


Time Has Told Me

by sullypants



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Historical AU, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Loss of Parent(s), Period Typical Attitudes, Soulmate AU, War, note they are with other people before they are with each other, on race and gender and sexuality, ultimately a happy ending, wide swathes of American history happening in the background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:47:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27819979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sullypants/pseuds/sullypants
Summary: When Jughead Jones meets Betty Cooper, he has been twenty-eight for thirty-nine years.When Betty Cooper meets Jughead Jones, she’s been twenty-nine since 1961.A historical/soulmate au.
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 114
Kudos: 107
Collections: 8th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	1. Jughead

**Author's Note:**

> This is an au concept that came to me near-randomly last April. I didn’t think twice about it until mid-November, and now here we are, 21k words and three chapters later. 
> 
> So much thanks and gratitude to arsenicpanda and loveleee, who read this for me several times, and so thoughtfully. Their insight and attention to detail is invaluable, and their patience with my abuse of commas is commendable.
> 
> This is an AU that spans the majority of the twentieth century, and our protagonists live on different and overlapping timelines. As such, you’d be correct to assume they do a lot of living before they meet one another. If that’s not something you’re interested in, that is your prerogative and this story might not entirely be your bag. 
> 
> Finally, as I told beloved stillscape, I could not write a soulmate au that is uncolored by our many conversations about soulmate aus. If I could ask anything of you, it would be to read and enjoy her charming and slyly funny [Ninia](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19240420/chapters/45751684).

_New York City, 1916_

.

When Jughead Jones meets Betty Cooper, he has been twenty-eight for thirty-nine years. 

Although he’s not sure on the specifics—it’s hard to tell exactly when you stop aging—he knows he was born in 1905, on the fourth floor of a tenement on Orchard Street. 

.

Jughead’s earliest memory is the unmistakable aroma of roasted coffee beans, laced with the acrid, sharp smell of dust.

There’s a board made of scrap planks across the kitchen’s bathtub, and it’s here where they eat, when the table isn’t buried under a mound of coffee beans and detritus.

On Tuesdays, Gladys leads him and Jellybean through the city, pulling Jellybean by the hand up and over mud in the streets on rainy days. Jughead remembers the joy of sailing over puddles, like flying through the air, and he tears his eyes from his sister with a feeling he’s begun to recognize as envy. 

At the coffee warehouse on Laight Street, his mother carefully pulls a tightly knotted handkerchief from her bag. She picks out 25 cents and trades it for a sack heavy with the sweepings from the warehouse floor. 

On their walk home, when Jellybean complains of being tired, Gladys will sometimes hand the sack to him and then it is Jughead’s responsibility to carry it home, as Jellybean falls asleep upon his mother’s shoulder. 

Once home, Gladys carefully pours the bag out onto the kitchen board. 

Every week is different. Sometimes it is more chaff—literal chaff, and dust, and sometimes straw—than it is stray coffee beans. 

Each of them picks over the pile of coffee sweepings throughout the week. Their hands are never idle. If Jughead is caught fiddling with his spoon in his bowl, his mother will box his ears. He has mastered the art of holding a book borrowed from the lending library in his left hand, while his right picks through the detritus. 

For every pound of picked-over coffee beans, the man at the market on Mott Street will pay his mother twelve whole cents, and in every sack there might be eight or nine pounds of coffee to be gleaned. 

It takes a little less than a week to slowly pick over the coffee, but they can do it in a day if they’re dedicated. They usually finish on Saturday, so that his mother can sweep the board, Jughead helping her to lift it away and place it aside, so that they can take their weekly baths. 

Jughead always goes second, after Jellybean, who’s small and does not linger in the bath—so the water is never too cold or too dirty. 

.

By the time Jughead is eleven, he’s been selling newspapers for four years. 

If he’s lucky, he’ll sell out by about six o’clock, but sometimes he gets home even later, around eight. 

He gets picked on by the local drunks, but it’s nothing so unfamiliar to him. 

It’s only hard when the drunk is his father.

FP will post up on the nearest stoop until Jughead sells out, slowly sobering up, and then he’ll walk alongside Jughead, back to Orchard Street.

Jughead’s mother will narrow her eyes at his father, sniff the air when his back is turned—but she never says anything. Jellybean is only five; she is only excited by the return of her father and brother. 

Sometimes Gladys mumbles under her breath in Welsh—but Jughead doesn’t speak Welsh, and his father never reacts to her words. Dinner is always silent, but for Jellybean’s excited recounting of her own day. 

It goes on like this, six days a week, until his father is called up, and then it’s just the three of them.

.

Jughead follows his father—in a fashion.

He imagines his father on a ship moving east over the Atlantic, wonders what France is like, and Europe.

He asks his mother, but she hushes him, tells him Wales is not part of Europe, despite what he may have learned before he left the schoolroom.

He reads the headlines of the papers he sells, and he reads below the fold, and by the time he sells out for the day, he’s typically read through the full length of the paper. 

He imagines his father on a battlefield, tall and brave. Sometimes, he’ll spend the day lost in this daydream—but he feels guilty having done so. He thinks he could not tell his mother about these stories in his head; she would roll her eyes at him, tell him his father was not a hero, and that he should not let himself get distracted by fairy stories when there’s money in his pocket to be guarded.

Jughead doesn’t sell the evening edition, ceding his corner to Fogarty, who lives over on Elizabeth. 

He reads about the battle that kills his father, in a place called St. Quentin Canal, months before he even learns his father is dead. 

.

By 1922, Jughead is alone.

.

FP’s service pension is small. Gladys tells her children they’ll leave New York, travel to a place called Toledo, where her cousin lives. She can find work in the glass factory there, she has learned.

Jughead lies awake at night, turning this information over in his head. By morning, he’s decided: he’s going to stay.

.

He’s seventeen, and Gladys doesn’t try to argue with him when he tells her. 

Her lips become a thin line, and her eyes narrow as she peers down her nose at him.

They have the same nose, Jughead thinks. He sees it in the little mirror that hangs above the wash basin. It’s the part of him that’s most like his mother, because she always told him “you’re the spit of your father,” and he wonders if this is on her mind when she considers his declaration to stay behind. 

.

He finds himself a bed off the Bowery, on a tip from Fogarty. He’s not the only newsboy there (certainly not the youngest), and the rent is fair, and meals are included.

.

When he turns twenty, he no longer sells the paper. He’s lucked into an apprenticeship as a printer’s assistant at a press, and he instead gets to see the papers as they’re born.

He reeks of ink at all hours of the day, but he gets that much closer to the birth of the words he’s spent his life reading, and it just makes him hungrier.

.

If he can spare the change, he’ll go to the pictures. 

There is something about the darkness of the room, the play of light across the air, the sound of the organ music, that acts as a fish hook around Jughead’s attention, that reels him in and captures that attention nearly wholesale. 

Sometimes he forgets that he is not separated from these worlds by the white skrim of the theater’s screen. He dangles alongside Harold Lloyd, from a clock high above the ground, such that adrenaline pulses through his own veins.

He speaks no French, but Edna Purviance’s eyes pull him in and speak such volumes that he forgets to read the interstitials. The audience around him seems disappointed—where is Chaplin, is a film still a Chaplin film without the hijinks of the funny little man—but Jughead hardly hears their grumbles. Edna’s golden hair shines in the lights of the Parisian night, and her eyes stare directly into his own, and he is struck still by what he glimpses there.

.

At work on Varick Street, his fingers become stained with black ink, but he does not mind—he loves the smell of the ink itself, the weight of the linotype matrices in his palm, crawling into the tight spaces of the rotary press to find a jam. 

He watches words come together to form sentences, how those sentences build to paragraphs, how the pages build upon themselves. How they are carefully sewn and bound together. 

He thinks about how Weatherbee, his boss, looks over the tops of his glasses at each manuscript page that finds its way to his hand, watches as he adds a strike here, how he skims the sentences that will soon be a book.

Jughead is pragmatic, but there’s something to it, he thinks. There’s magic in these words that he wishes he could hold in his own two hands, that he could capture and tame. He wonders if he might ever see his own stories exist in the world this way, if he could put them into words, and what that might be like. It’s too distant a dream for him to see clearly.

.

There’s a woman at the theater; she’s there at the organ, playing the accompanist, nearly every time Jughead visits.

Sometimes, if Jughead has seen the film already and found it boring, or if he loses interest in a newsreel, he’ll watch her play, how her fingers roam over the keys of the organ, like the man with the marionettes who used to roam the streets and make plays for children.

Jughead would have watched that man’s stories for hours, had Gladys not dragged him homeward nearly every time.

But this woman, though her hands are like the puppetmaster's, is different. Jughead is not sure he has ever seen her smile. He’s not certain he’s ever seen her so much as acknowledge the audience in the theater that she plays for, or the fifteen foot tall faces that are illuminated in light just over her left shoulder.

If Jughead had infinite funds, he thinks he’d like to be in pictures. Not _in_ pictures—he has no desire to be so much on a stage, but to be in these other places, with other people. Sometimes he’s reminded of Jellybean when Mabel Normand’s eyes flash, or when Mary Pickford’s curls momentarily obscure her face, and he feels an ache in his chest that he tries to ignore. 

.

It’s not until after _The Black Pirate_ that it happens.

For all the times he has visited this theater, he has never once seen the woman’s eyes.

But today, at the end of the night, as the last stragglers are being ushered out and Jughead’s gaze is lingering once more upon this stranger—she looks up.

The motion is so sudden it nearly startles movement from him. She looks up, and her eyes meet his own, and as soon as it happens it is over.

She’s out the side-door before Jughead can even acknowledge her.

.

The following week, it happens a little more slowly.

The night ends, and the woman looks up at Jughead once more, and this time keeps his gaze. 

He’s not sure what to think, but there’s a look in her gray eyes that Jughead thinks might be thoughtful. But then—she is packing her sheet music into its folio, and tucking it under her arm, and retreating once more through the side door into the alley.

.

That’s where he meets her, after a drizzly Sunday matinee.

When she looks up to see him standing there, hands in his pockets, she seems startled, glancing quickly at the end of the alley and then back at Jughead, as though calculating her chances of making a run for it.

He realizes his mistake, and stutters out an apology.

“I just—I wanted to say, I like your playing,” he says. “You play beautifully.” He nods, and again feels a little foolish.

The woman with the gray eyes narrows them, but no longer appears fearful.

“Thank you,” she says, adjusting her hat. She pauses, and then tells him, “I’m off to my dinner.”

Jughead nods, and bids her farewell, watches as she disappears out of the alley and into the street.

.

The next time, it is unintentional—at least, Jughead thinks so.

He is not standing on the corner, a block from the theater, and finishing a cigarette and waiting for the woman who plays the organ at the pictures.

That’s who is there, though, when he turns at the sound of a soft _hello_ at his elbow.

.

They both walk a block, and he learns her name is Miss Joan Jumpp— _Mrs._ Jumpp. She is a widow, the second battle at the Somme. He can’t think she is much older than he is, but he knows such things can be deceiving.

They stop to buy oysters from the man with the cart at the corner. When they’ve each eaten their share, Jughead offers his hands out to Mrs. Jumpp, to collect her spent shells, to dispose of them on her behalf.

She pours the rough half-shells into his palms, and Jughead feels the warm gentle pressure of her thumb to the flesh of his wrist, below the knobby bump of his wrist bone. It’s brief, but when he tosses the shells and looks back up to meet her eye, she keeps his gaze.

.

Jughead has never been with a woman before. 

He instinctually thinks that he’s glad Joan—for surely “Mrs. Jumpp” would not do in this setting—is a widow, because one of them should know what they are doing, before a wash of guilt floods through him at the very thought.

Still—Joan does not ask much of him, so much as she tells him, shows him, what she wants him to do—a hand there, grasp here.

When she pushes him to lie upon her bed, and she climbs atop him, he watches her face. She seems determined. 

“I’m not made of glass, please,” she says, and he doesn’t wonder if he might be instead.

After, she tells him, “Don’t worry, I won’t have your baby.”

Jughead’s not sure how to respond. Joan seems to confuse his silence for ignorance—perhaps not incorrectly, he realizes. His mind feels so full of _things_ , he’s certain he’s forgotten something. 

“There are ways of stopping that, you see,” she continues.

Joan moves about her kitchen, in the small apartment she lives in alone, about the size of the one on Orchard Street—but Jughead hasn’t lived there, not for a long time.

She offers him tea against the cold draft that sweeps under the door. She watches the water, waits for it to boil, and wraps her arms around her chest. “I don’t want to have a baby,” she says.

.

It is not the last time he lies with Joan. It becomes something that happens every few weeks.

Jughead thinks Joan is lonely, that she misses her husband, dead in the war. He thinks this because he sometimes wakes to the sound of her quiet tears from the other side of the bed, the gentle shake of the sheets as she silently sobs beside him. He does not reach out to her, but instead lies awake beside her, listens as her tears lessen and eventually subside, as her breathing evens out.

He thinks this, because she once calls him Michael by accident, as she makes his tea. He can see her shoulders stiffen, but she does not acknowledge the error, and so he pretends it has not happened.

But then it stops. Joan does not catch his eye at the theater. He does not approach her as she leaves, or in the alley, or on the corner, and then as though it had never happened, Mrs. Jumpp is once more a stranger.

.

In 1929, he loses his job.

He has a small purse of savings, and it quickly becomes obvious to him that soon he will be destitute, and that there are no means of avoiding this fate if he is to stay in New York.

So he leaves New York.

.

He’s never left this city before, and he finds Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky all strange marvels. Everything is novel.

He’s hardly the only soul out wandering—seemingly everyone is out of work. 

Sometimes he finds himself in company with other wanderers, but he finds solitude preferable. 

When he finds himself in extended solitude, he begins to write long letters to his sister, getting his thoughts out of his head, saving them to mail when he’s able to purchase postage. He describes the things he sees, the people he meets, the meals he eats. Sometimes, upon rereading these letters, he thinks they’re written more to himself than Jellybean. 

He saves those letters apart, puts them into the leaves of his copy of _Huckleberry Finn_ , the binding of which he’s repaired more times than he could count.

The quiet is a stark change from the city. An open field reminds him of nothing so much as it does the wide expanse of a white screen in a dark room.

But small towns have movie theaters too, he discovers, and when he scrapes the pennies together, he spends a few hours in the dark, watching the lights and lives play across that field.

.

When Jughead reaches Toledo, he learns his mother has died.

Jellybean has apparently sent him a letter—she tells him this once he has asked around and finally found her—care of one of the many post offices he has stopped to mail her letters. But he hasn’t visited a place more than once. He realizes again how one-sided his correspondence with his sister has been.

It has been eleven years since she left New York, and Jellybean—JB, as she tells him people in Toledo call her—is an adult. She is six years younger than him. He remembers her in braided pigtails, and now she is a graduate of teachers’ college, a person who young people, much younger than either of them, listen to, believe. 

Gladys has been gone nearly a year. It happened in her sleep, JB tells him, and Jughead thinks of his mother as she was when he last saw her, in 1922.

JB thanks him for the letters he has sent her over the years. She tells him that when she left New York with their mother, she most missed the stories he would tell her before she fell asleep. 

.

He spends a week in Toledo, under the roof of the boarding house where his sister lives among her fellow teachers and a few factory girls. The landlady frowns every time she sees him, but the resemblance between the Jones siblings is so transparent as to preclude any suggestion of funny business, and he makes a point not to fraternize with the other boarders. He does not want to disrupt his sister’s life here, which seems full and happy. The boarders pull her to the piano in the common room, and make requests of her for particular songs they would like her to play.

Something in him feels out of place here, and though he has missed his sister desperately over the years, he has never once thought he should have followed his mother to this place.

.

JB is twenty-four now. It is harder to tell how different they are in age, and Jughead thinks ahead, wonders at which point—should it ever come—his sister might catch up, might pass him.

.

On a road somewhere outside of Toledo, he comes across a dead early Model T, and the family of six who’d hoped it would carry them farther west than Ohio.

Jughead doffs his father’s ever-more-frayed hat at the mother of the family, and asks the father—whose hands are covered in grease and who wears a mean look upon his face—about his troubles.

Car engines, Jughead has discovered, are just as mechanical as the press.

His repair skill earns him a ride farther west.

.

By Iowa, his father’s Homburg threatens to fall apart.

A mechanic at the garage in Dubuque, who has promised him meals and the comfort of a hay loft for a week’s work, spits out his tobacco and tells Jughead that it’s mendable—or at least, adaptable.

He slams Jughead’s hat inside out with a fist and shocking force, but it does not fall to pieces. He trims and neatens the frayed brim, such that they appear more like intentional prongs than neglected, and presents it to Jughead as though on a platter.

“Your crown, good sir,” he mocks congenially, with a bow, and Jughead can only shrug and accept his lot.

.

Twin Falls, Idaho, has work going.

Jughead gets a job at the sugar beet factory, accepts every task that is asked of him—slicing the beets into cossettes, shoveling coke and limestone, running the screw press. 

His fingers take on a semi-permanent state of stickiness.

It’s just as well, because he is cut from the workforce when the harvest slows.

The shipment center offers him a spot a few idle weeks later. Onions, and potatoes—but mostly onions. It’s still better than the beets, he thinks.

.

Jughead continues his letters to Jellybean, but he also writes to himself—maybe _for_ himself, or for whatever entity might ever read these scribbles upon discarded scraps of paper. He does not revisit them often, but he also cannot bring himself to throw them away. 

.

There’s a waitress down at Dee’s Cafe, where Jughead treats himself to a hot meal once or twice a week. She has curly hair and winks at him when she pours his coffee.

One night, as he rests back upon his heels, his spine straight against the rear wall of the diner, his cigarette smoke clears and there she is.

She crouches down beside him, accepts the light of the match he offers her. He carefully tamps out the flame with his thumb and forefinger, wraps it into his handkerchief, and tucks it back into his pocket.

The woman exhales smoke slowly and watches his movements. His tongue fidgets with his own cigarette, where it rests between his lips, and he watches her back.

“You’re very careful, aren’t you?” she says.

.

Her name is Trula, he learns.

Mrs. Twyst is what the customers of the cafe call her, and he wonders about Mr. Twyst.

“He’s in Alberta,” she tells him, and he can tell from her tone that he should ask no further questions. 

One night, after they share another cigarette at the back of the cafe, at the end of her shift, she stands and stretches.

“Will you come with me?” she asks, and so he goes.

.

It isn’t that he never asks her questions. He just tries to be judicious about it. 

Trula can be mean. Her eyes can narrow, and her voice becomes cold, and then it’s a waiting game.

But Jughead is curious. He’s begun to wonder if he’s slowed down. He doesn’t know how to tell.

“Do you love your husband?” he asks her one night, his toes cold under the blanket, as they pass a cigarette back and forth.

Trula blows out a smoke ring and smiles up at her work. 

“He’s alright.” She shrugs. “We’ve been married a long time.”

When she sniffs, he turns his eyes back up to the ceiling, considers the line through the cracked plaster, where it forks as it nears and meets the wall.

Trula falls asleep before him. He can tell by the way her breath levels out, slowly, quietly. 

.

Jughead pays attention. He listens to people when they talk, and sometimes to people who don’t even notice his presence.

The writing’s on the wall. He’ll hold off until it seems inevitable, until a draft is imminent. Then he’ll enlist. Might as well pick the branch he finds most interesting, if they’ll have him. 

But first, he goes west again. 

.

He hitches a ride with an old man passing through Twin Falls, bound for Salinas and its canneries.

He tells Jughead he’s been “over the earth a few times,” but Jughead perceives him to be mostly sane, and so takes him up on the offer.

It turns out, the man has reckoned that with things heating up in Europe, perhaps there might soon be a shortage of able-bodied young men—and that therefore there might soon be work going at those canneries.

Jughead listens, lets the old man talk. He watches the road before them and the landscape as it slowly changes.

“I’ve been this way for a while now,” the man—Svenson—says, gesturing to his face, on the third day of the trip.

Svenson glances at Jughead briefly before his eyes return to the dust of the road before them. 

Jughead watches him and reflects on this information.

Svenson is perhaps in his fifties—as ever, this sort of thing isn’t always easy to tell, especially in someone like Svenson, who has clearly lived a journeyman’s life.

Svenson is silent as Jughead chews this over, as though letting him digest this information.

“You’ve—you’re stopped?” Jughead finally asks, and Svenson nods an emphatic _yes,_ like it's a trick he's used to revealing with aplomb.

This is Svenson’s reality, Jughead thinks; he has had time to digest this shock, but to Jughead this knowledge feels earth-shattering.

Jughead’s never met someone who’d stopped so late in life. At least, he assumes he hasn’t. It’s not something he’d ever ask about; this seems a question too close to a person’s heart to be broached by a stranger, and most people are strangers to Jughead. Most people stop much earlier, in young adulthood.

He isn’t certain of himself—it’s so hard to be certain—but thinks it might have happened. 

It’s hard to tell. How different is a person in his late twenties from one in his early thirties?

His father died unnaturally, somewhere in a field in France. He’s buried there. Jughead can’t really remember what his father looked like the last time he saw him, but he knows FP had been in his thirties, probably his late thirties, for at least a decade, if not more. 

The only photo of his father that he has is from—he thinks—1917. FP wears his Army uniform. 

Jughead doesn’t like to think about his parents’ marriage, about the last time he saw his mother, how old she had seemed then. 

She’d been widowed for several years by then, and her life had been hard. 

He doesn’t know if it was life that aged her, a tough life that never seemed to offer a moment of respite—or if she had lost someone. He knows that someone, if they ever existed, wasn’t his father. He does not know if his parents were to each other what soulmates might be, whatever that is.

He wonders if Jellybean has caught up with him. 

Of course, some people don’t ever stop—but is that because they’ve met their soulmate and somehow missed them? Were they so unlucky as to have lost them, to accident or illness—things no human can thwart? Do some people not even _have_ a soulmate?

Jughead has often wondered this, when he is lying awake at night unable to sleep. It pops into his head at odd moments, unexpected, like an old friend, nearly forgotten, who shows up again and refuses to leave him alone.

Jughead does not consider himself a lucky person. Fate is fickle, and cruel, he has decided. His days are an endless, literal expanse of thumbing his nose at the nonsense and confusion of this world.

He thinks that things begin and that things end. The only aim is to strive to cause little harm, as minimal an eddy upon the surface of this world, as he is able.

.

He sees the Pacific for the first time at an ungodly hour of the morning.

Svenson drops him off three miles from the shoreline, for they’re bound in different directions.

Svenson drives off, waving his hat out the window in farewell. Jughead doffs his own in thanks.

There’s a crick in his neck, and it’s been there since he hopped out of the old man’s car where the road forked and he’d started walking. 

He shifts the weight of his bag from one shoulder to the other, thinks of his mother’s coffee beans, and feels the sun begin to warm the back of his neck.

The sea approaches him slowly. It makes its presence known long before he sees it, in the cries of the gulls above, in the brackish scent of salt in the air, and then—it is there.

It is as though the world drops out before him, and all he can see is horizon, endless horizon.

.

Nineteen forty-three finds Jughead tired and wet, crouching low on a beach at Salerno.

Up until this point, his war has been fairly uneventful. He’d found himself part of the Fifth Army, in North Africa after it had been secured by the Allies; he’d played no part in invading Sicily—but now the sand sticks to his face, travels down the collar of his uniform to his back, splatters like little pieces of glass onto his helmet, and he feels none of it. 

His ears ring. The only thought he has, and it overrides everything, is _up the beach find Smythe, up the beach find Smythe_.

.

Jughead, it turns out, has picked up enough certifiable mechanical skills over the years to earn him some actual training and eventual embedment in a unit in need of such skills.

There’s Wilkins, who everyone calls Bingo for a reason Jughead never understands; Malloy, without luck; Hawse, short enough that Jughead wonders how he wasn’t classified 4F; Ronson, a bruiser; and Smythe, who orders them around because he’s been given that power and it has clearly gone to his head.

Jughead doesn’t realize how much he’s come to depend upon these people until he finds himself without them, on this beach, under heavy fire, on the west coast of Italy.

He doesn’t look closely at the prone shadows he passes upon the sand, because they do not move. He’s not the first to pass this way, and he will not be the last. He can tell at a glance that he passes no one who will be going home to smiling faces.

.

He isn’t quite sure how he does it, but eventually he finds cover and familiar faces. These faces pass him down the line—and there’s Smythe, whose angry red face Jughead thinks he’s never been happier to confront.

.

The ruins of the temple at Paestum stop Jughead in his tracks—Malloy bumps into him from behind and shoves him to get him moving again. He walks with one eye on the columns of the building.

It’s not so different from the many other gutted buildings they’ve already passed on this road—around every turn there appears half a house, or an abandoned cottage, more than once even a stone church, its arches begun to crumble.

But this temple still strikes him, and as he marches, he begins to write another letter to Jellybean—JB—about it in his head.

.

Jughead finds that there is no medium—either his squadron is bored to death, listless, playing poker for symbolic pieces of paper with a deck of cards Ronson’s carried here from basic training or they are moving quickly, going days without sleep, running through the motions, and moving north toward Rome.

Jughead has never felt so young as he does here in Italy.

.

They move slowly north, up the west coast, in parallel with the British Eighth Army. 

Jughead thinks again of the ruins at Paestum when they reach Monte Cassino, as the abbey there is targeted by the RAF, and when Smythe takes a bullet for Ronson in February. 

.

Come June, Rome feels like a respite, even if they soon hear that the First Army has landed at Normandy, and their capture of Mussolini’s capital, their push of the Germans north, is relegated to old news within twenty-four hours. There are church bells ringing throughout the streets, and the dissonance feels unsettling, so different from the cacophony of shells and mortars, of engines and artillery. 

Jughead is pushed to celebrate by an instigating Hawse, a man whose childlike face masks his mischievousness. 

Jughead is dragged into the crowd of dancers by a woman with brown eyes and curly brown hair, who seems to speak no English. His Italian is so poor, he only understands her when she beckons him to follow her, and in the dark of the alley, with his mind distracted by the Italian beer he has downed, she lets him slip his tongue into her mouth, as she slides her hand below his belt.

.

Given everything he has seen, Jughead does not expect to return whole to America at the end of the war, if the end of the war ever comes. He is continually surprised to find himself still alive, if filthy and uncomfortable and tired and scared, when he considers those he has met who are not.

He thinks about his father. He follows those paths through his mind like dark threads, unwinding his childhood stories of his father from his own current reality. He doesn’t know what year his father was born, but he wonders if he is now older than his father had ever been. 

.

These thoughts continue to turn silently, somewhere in the back of his head, when he finds himself back in New York when the war is over.

At this point, he knows. He’s certain he’s stopped. 

He’s seen some awful, horrible things in his time. Now he has some money in his pocket, some things to write about, and he’s hoping to perhaps get some things done before he departs this earth.

And it’ll be his choice when that happens, he thinks. For the most part—accidents happen, after all. He’ll look both ways before crossing and hope for the best. 

.

His sister has passed him while he was away. 

He gets a letter from her, from Oregon, of all places. She’s vague, and Jughead can’t really suss out what she’s trying to tell him, but he gets the main idea.

She is in love, and she is in love with her soulmate. She is, she thinks, in her early thirties. 

.

Jughead spends the late forties glued to his Underwood. 

He finds a cheap apartment off MacDougal and makes money by spending long nights down at the precinct, writing about the minor criminals that come in and out of what might as well be a revolving door. The _National Guardian_ pays him decently, but the _Herald Tribune_ and the _Daily Mirror_ pay him more. He’s got some unease at affiliating himself with a Hearst paper—but the rent doesn’t pay itself. 

When the cops think things have died down for the night, or when he’s simply too bored to continue, he’ll drag himself down to one of the coffee shops. He’ll find himself a table in the corner, somewhere he will be left alone, and he writes for himself. 

He scribbles onto scrap papers he’s picked up from the floor of the precinct, from the wastepaper baskets down at the paper. 

Mostly people leave him alone, and mostly he can tune out the noise around him. 

He lets himself go a little. He’s always been trim, and he still is. But he goes several months without getting a haircut and thinks he might as well go several months more. 

People on the street tend to give him a wide berth. That’s fine. He likes to be left alone.

It’s several years before he looks up and notices that everyone else seems to have caught up with him, at least in the Village. 

.

It’s on one of his late writing nights at the Cafe Reggio that he meets her.

She’s a waitress, and she’s served him more than once, but he’s always appreciated that her curious eyes have ultimately left him alone. He’s tipped decently in hopes that practice continues.

He miscalculates.

On a rainy November evening, when it’s cold enough that the rain feels freezing yet never solidifies into snow, she brings him his coffee and then doesn’t retreat back to the counter. 

He looks up from his scrap to see her regarding him with a canny gaze. He makes an attempt at being solicitous; the coffee here is decent, and he’s always been able to get a table. 

“Where you from?” 

“Massachusetts,” she responds.

His eyebrows lift in what he hopes conveys polite disinterest. “Oh?”

“Salem—well. Peabody, actually,” she corrects herself. “But nobody knows Peabody, so I say Salem. It’s actually just as witchy.” She shrugs, as though what she says should be obvious. “It’s where John Proctor lived, after all.”

He nods. “Makes sense.” He sips his coffee, and looks back up when he realizes she’s still not leaving. 

Her eyes are narrow, and he feels somewhat uncomfortably observed. 

“You from Massachusetts?” His head shakes.

“Hmm,” she responds. Her tray is tucked underneath one arm, and the other fist rests upon her waist. She’s a tiny thing, but to Jughead’s perception she’s taking up most of the air in this space. 

Finally, she nods. “You seem like a moody son of a bitch.”

He bobs his head at her.

“You’re not wrong.” 

.

It’s been a while, he thinks. Not since Italy, and before then, Trula. 

Sabrina winks at him before she retreats behind the counter, and he thinks the night is cold. _Why not?_

.

It sort of becomes a regular thing, unexpectedly. 

On any given night he stops at that cafe, maybe three times a week (he likes to keep up a rotation of the local places, never overstaying his welcome), Sabrina comes home with him.

She’s got a roommate and a cat (“He’s named Salem, too”), and he lives alone, so his apartment makes more sense. 

Sabrina doesn’t seem to expect too much from him. They often stop at the diner on the corner in the mornings for breakfast, but just as often Sabrina wakes him up simply to say goodbye before she leaves at dawn. 

.

He pulls the tightly bundled pile of scraps out from his army duffle, where it has sat since before the war.

He reads them all. He set some aside—more than he expects, really—and types them up. He does a sloppy job, but it’s just fine.

He lays them out across his floor, stands upon his kitchen chair to survey them from on high.

.

“I’m moving,” Sabrina announces as she pulls her dress over her head.

She adjusts the skirt around her hips and bends her arm at an awkward angle to reach her zipper. Her voice sounds excited.

Jughead leans to ash his cigarette in the tray that sits beside his bed, and reaches to adjust the collar of his own freshly-donned sweater. His apartment is cold.

He raises his eyebrows, moves to follow Sabrina into his kitchen, and asks, “Where to?” as he begins to fill the kettle with water.

His hand is halfway to the tin of coffee on his shelf when he freezes in surprise at her sing-songed response.

“San Francisco!”

When Jughead turns to look at her, she’s slipping her feet into her shoes.

“Really?” he asks.

“Yes! New York is…” she trails off thoughtfully as she pulls her coat over her shoulders, flips her hair out from under the collar. “I’m just done with it,” she tells him.

He leans against his kitchen sink, crosses his arms over his chest, and nods.

“Well,” he begins, but he doesn’t really know how to continue.

Sabrina smiles. She winks at him as she reaches across his table toward where his hat lies, discarded hastily, and walks the short distance to cross his small kitchen.

She stops before him and stretches her arms to plop his hat upon his head. She fidgets with one of the pins for a moment, but then she looks him in the eye with a smile that Jughead can’t really read.

“Don’t worry, Jonesy. You’ll find them,” she says. “And they won’t even mind your funny hat, either.”

.

There’s a man Jughead runs into sometimes at the Kettle of Fish, who goes by the name of Whitney. “The name’s Walt, but call me Whitney,” he tells everyone he meets. 

He seems like something of a blowhard, but if he’s to be believed, he’s in publishing.

Turns out he’s straight, so Jughead takes a breath and tells him, “I’ve written something.”

.

Jughead knows his hat is funny.

But he likes his hat. It’s his father's old hat. It's long grown old and ragged. He clipped the pins onto it himself. 

He also knows that he could keep wearing this hat forever, and eventually, eventually—the tides would turn and he’d be at the crest of a trend, a trend he’d ride up and over and out again. 

It all comes back around. It’s the same reason he still wears his suspenders, these sturdy boots that have lasted him over twenty years (with a resoling every few years or so). 

Times change, and he remains the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The title of this story comes from the Nick Drake song of the same name.
> 
> Next, Betty.


	2. Betty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Appreciation is again due to arsenicpanda and loveleee, and also to village-skeptic. This is a better story for their generosity.
> 
> Please be mindful of the tags.

_Sacramento, 1939_

  
  
  


When Betty Cooper meets Jughead Jones, she’s been twenty-nine since 1961. 

She keeps leaving California, but she also keeps finding her way back.

.

When Betty is still young enough to be considered both too young to be left to her own devices and yet too old to be so much under her mother’s feet, Alice sometimes sends her to the newspaper with her father. 

“Better out of the house than in and reading those comics,” her mother tells her. Betty still slides an issue of _Jane Arden_ into her bag. “Crime Reporter” reads the banner across Jane’s name. 

Sacramento summers are hot, and dry. Betty watches the Sacramento River flow below her as they cross the bridge, from the passenger seat of her father’s 1937 Chevrolet Master—a rare vantage for her, as the youngest of the family—and the alfalfa fields for miles before that. She thinks about how green everything is, wonders how it stays so bright when the lawn of her home has long since browned and crisped under the sun. 

Her mother has neatly combed Betty’s hair into two braids, she’s wearing her smartest gingham pinafore, and the copper coins in her penny loafers shine bright under the California sun.

She has to summon all her composure to keep from skipping alongside her father as they enter the building, as they rise in the elevator.

Miss Bell, the _Union_ ’s head secretary, gives her a sweet smile, and Betty feels very grown-up to walk beside her father in the place where they make the newspaper. 

At home, Betty’s mother only lets her read some of the newspaper, and always after Alice has scanned it herself, but here Hal sets her up with several full editions from around the region, and even as far away as Los Angeles, and she is allowed to pore over them to her heart’s content.

(Dad gives her a penny for every copy error she finds in a competitor’s final print.)

Betty reads every page from top to bottom, including all the captions, and call-outs, and subheadings. 

She reads about the market price of walnut yields, a review of _The Wizard of Oz_ (“we shall merely mention, and not dwell upon, the circumstance that even such great wizards as those who lurk in the concrete caverns of California are often tripped in their flights of fancy by trailing vines of piano wire and outcroppings of putty noses.”), and about a place called Poland. Betty is very good at geography, even better than Polly even though she’s two years younger, and she knows Poland is in Europe, as is Germany.

.

Betty’s father is granted an exemption from the draft, when the draft comes—not just because he is married, with two young children, but also because he is a newspaperman.

Still—he is their neighborhood air raid warden. Betty feels guilty to be glad her father isn’t dead when Midge Klump is pulled out of Composition and does not return for several weeks. They all know what it means when the black car pulls up to your house and the man in uniform steps out. The news spreads very quickly.

.

This is what colors Betty’s youth: scrap metal drives, victory gardens, and people leaving, only to not come home again.

.

High school is different though.

The war is over, but it’s not only that.

Polly wants to get married, to have babies, but none of that appeals to Betty. She wants to go to college—and not just to Cal, but to Smith, or Bryn Mawr.

She tells her mother this, and Alice purses her lips. She looks into the mirror with a critical eye, narrowed at her own reflection. 

As Betty stands idly by, she watches her mother reach a hand toward her temple, brush gently at the hairs there until with a sharp, quick movement she plucks a single strand of hair from her scalp. 

“You’ll have to work very hard,” she tells Betty, as she regards the strand of hair closely. “You’ll have to really want it.”

Betty’s mother throws the hair away, and Betty bites the inside of her cheek and nods.

.

She works hard.

Polly dates in high school (although she never gets pinned—Hal would never allow it), but Betty keeps her focus. She is second in her class, behind only Dilton Doiley.

At least he’s not going to Wellesley, she thinks.

.

Something finally snaps in the Cooper house, a hair trigger is tripped, in 1948.

Betty is often sent to her room, as her parents and Polly have a series of increasingly loud rows.

Polly won’t tell her what they’re about, and the look in her mother’s eye prevents Betty from even considering asking—but she finally gets something out of her father, when they’re both under the hood of the family Chevy (the 1947 Stylemaster) on a Saturday morning.

At first Hal is silent to her question, and Betty wonders if she’s spoken too quietly. But she sees his eyes focus on the manifold, and she waits him out, continues following the length of the plug wires with her eyes, shifting them so they’re not too close to the header, until he finally speaks.

“Polly says she’s getting married,” he says, “she’s met her—”

Her father half-gestures with his hand, and the unsaid _soulmate_ lingers on the air, light like a feather and just as insubstantial, Betty thinks.

“His name’s Blossom,” Hal ducks his head back under the hood and does not meet Betty’s eye. “We’re actually...distant cousins,” he says. “Distant,” he repeats the word, as though he feels torn between claiming this person and disowning his daughter.

.

In the end it doesn’t matter. 

Polly runs away with Jason Blossom the same week Betty receives her letter from Wellesley.

.

In some ways, Wellesley feels like it’s full of other Bettys.

It’s not that there’s a multiplicity of Elizabeths (although there is, and Betty quickly adapts to summonses of Cooper and even, affectionately, Coop), so much as she is surrounded by exceptionally bright, very polished, very knowing young women. She’s the small fish, and she finds she does not mind it.

It’s in her Modern European History survey that she meets Veronica Lodge, and suddenly she knows, just _knows_ , that there must be infinite kinds of people in the world, but among the best are those that shine their light upon you. 

Veronica is unflappable, and sharp, and sometimes wild. Betty is in no rush to date or to gossip, having every intention of continuing her high school practice of focus and determination. She wants to do well here, she wants to succeed, and as her mother has always told her, focus is invaluable. 

But Veronica shows her that there are all kinds of focus, and they do not necessarily negate one another.

Veronica tells Betty about New York City, about her parents’ wish that she attend Barnard, about how they wouldn’t let her even apply to Radcliffe for fear that the close proximity of Harvard’s student body would prove too much a distraction to their daughter, so distant from their careful supervision. Wellesley had been a compromise.

“But Cambridge is only a train ride away,” Betty pointed out.

Veronica had simply winked.

.

Betty barely blinks and Christmas is here.

She takes the train down to New York with Veronica. A transcontinental flight isn’t much of an option for her purse, and she begs off the long train journey west to her parents, citing the length, and how much the back and forth would truncate an already short winter break.

The Lodges live high above the city—or so it feels to her—and Betty can see the wide snowy swathe of Central Park from Veronica’s bedroom.

She’s never been in a place as full as New York is, and something as banal as lunch at Schrafft's and an afternoon browsing B. Altman with Mrs. Lodge takes on a novelty that thrills her, to Veronica's evident and affectionate delight.

.

The New Year comes and goes before Betty is ready and with it, her first sip of champagne, from a coupe poured for and handed to her by the Lodges’ man Smithers.

To find herself back in Massachusetts, back in Modern European History once more, makes it seem like it’d all been a dream.

.

There’s a lot of excitement when the television set appears in the common room.

It’s a gift to the girls from a student’s parents, and everyone crowds around it with excitement. Their voices rise to a din and Miss Haggly, the house mother, has to speak loudly to secure order.

Rules are established, but Betty only half listens as she stands near the door of the common room, watching her classmates listen to Miss Haggly remind them about curfew.

Cricket O'Dell fiddles with the set’s buttons and the television sparks to life, and with a few more twists of the dial, they have fanned out around this bright black and white light.

Betty watches carefully, leaning against the doorframe, as a whistling tune emits from the tinny speakers and the picture announces itself as _The Life of Riley_.

It quickly becomes apparent the title is ironic, for Riley does not appear to live a charmed life. He seems especially perturbed with his daughter’s preoccupation with a gentleman she hopes is her soulmate. She is very much in love, she argues to him, convinced this man—played by an actor with wide eyes and a deep baritone—is her person. This daughter—Babs is her name, Betty gathers—has bright white teeth and a wide, open smile. 

Betty stands and watches. Soon, before the story has finished, she quietly turns around and retreats to her room. 

.

Veronica finally convinces Betty to attend the spring fling come March.

The men from Yale drive up, and the boys at Harvard take the train out, and Betty accepts dance after dance.

Her dress is blue, her lipstick is red, and her cheeks are warm. Some of the boys have snuck in flasks, and Betty takes a swig every time Veronica does, and the warmth in her cheeks only heightens, and she feels the stretch of her smile in her jaw.

At the end of the night, Veronica drags her away, on the escape from a future engineer from Harvard who Veronica says stepped on her toes not once, not twice, but thrice. The disclosure leaves them breathless with near-hysterical laughter as they stumble back into Veronica’s room, as Veronica tells Betty about a Dartmouth boy she’d met last year at a Columbia dance, named Archie, how she’d gotten a letter from him just last week, how he seemed sweet, how he’d said that he was going to attend Yale’s prom this year with a pal, and would she be there?

Betty listens to Veronica speak, watches Veronica remove her earrings, wipe away her lipstick, turn so that Betty can help unzip her, and Veronica asks Betty if she _really_ doesn't have a beau back in Sacramento?

“No?” Veronica says when Betty shakes her head. “What’s wrong with California boys?” she asks, as though there must be some mistake, and Betty blushes under her eye.

“I’ve never even been kissed,” Betty tells her, and Veronica’s eyes soften. She stops her brush midstroke and turns to Betty with determination.

“Well let’s fix that,” she says, tossing the brush down and moving to sit beside Betty upon the bed.

Betty’s knee digs into Veronica’s thigh, and Betty can feel the silkiness of Veronica’s slip upon her skin. Veronica turns to her, eyes bright. “You trust me, don’t you?” 

Betty nods, and then Veronica leans toward her and her lips are soft upon Betty’s.

It’s nice. Betty feels a warmth behind her abdomen, and can feel Veronica’s hand upon her collar, and then she can feel the warm wet of Veronica’s mouth open to hers.

When Veronica pulls back, neither of them speak, but Veronica’s smile warms Betty’s heart, and the warmth in her abdomen hooks around and behind her spine when Veronica brushes Betty's hair behind her shoulder.

Betty leans in this time, and Veronica meets her in the middle. 

Veronica helps Betty out of her blue dress, the one her mother had purchased for her at Mangin’s, and Betty helps Veronica push off her slip.

Then they are curled atop Veronica’s blankets, and Betty’s not sure their mouths have parted for more than a moment, as their hands have roamed, as they have explored one another’s contradictions, their softness and firmness.

.

They don’t really discuss it, and Betty feels okay, kind of nice even, to have this secret about herself, about this thing she has done or been with Veronica.

But it doesn’t happen again. 

Betty meets Archie Andrews at the Yale prom, and hugs Veronica tightly when her friend tells her Archie has invited her to a weekend in Maine to meet his parents.

Betty is happy to see Veronica happy, but she is also afraid of being left behind. 

She carpools with Brigitte Reilly and Cricket O’Dell up to New Hampshire for a weekend of spring skiing, and there she runs into Dilton Doiley, her old high school yardstick.

She ends up spending most of the evening talking with him—about his studies at Princeton, his eating club, about her own time at Wellesley, and their old high school friends.

When he leans in to kiss her, she doesn’t pull back. It’s alright, she thinks, but they continue talking as though it has not happened.

Betty’s still thinking about it as Dilton tells her about the experiment he is working on, how his lab cultures had inadvertently been spoiled when another student left them exposed on top of a radiator, but Betty is thinking that Dilton might be a good choice.

She can trust Dilton; he’s not likely to blab to everyone back in Sacramento, and if it is terrible—well, he’s returning to Princeton, and she’ll be back in Wellesley before long.

This time, she leans in to kiss him.

.

It doesn’t happen until the next night, however, when Dilton drives her back alone from the diner where they’ve escaped the hotel dining room’s abysmal cooking. Their friends are in another car. 

She’s the one who gives him the idea, and she finds his shock amusing. But after he thinks about it for several minutes, long enough that Betty thinks he is trying to summon the nerve to politely decline, he agrees.

.

It happens in, of all places, the very car in which she’d posed the idea.

Betty commends herself for how she’d presented it to him, as though it were an opportunity for discovery, a mission of curiosity.

Dilton may be a full inch shorter than her, but when they are lying together it isn’t so awkward. 

There is none of the instinctual ease that there had been with Veronica, but it’s not nearly as painful as Polly had warned her it’d be. She’s made herself feel better, even Veronica made her feel better (but perhaps Veronica has more experience, she wonders; she’s secretly what Betty’s mother would call a fast girl, but Betty thinks _No faster than Polly_ , and realizes maybe no faster than herself.)

Dilton is polite, almost exceedingly so, continually asking after her, however many times she ensures him that she is alright.

.

Afterwards, Dilton drives her back to where she and her friends are staying, and she kisses him gently on the cheek when she bids him farewell. She knows she will not see Dilton again in the near future, and she’s sure he knows this too, even though this remains an unspoken truth between them. 

.

Hal Cooper kills himself toward the end of 1953, when Betty is half-way through her third year at Wellesley. 

His children are grown, are mostly independent, if not yet both settled into marriages to nice young men. Polly has long since married and moved to London—but Betty thinks her father has never fully recovered from this blow. He has the newspaper, and he has his car. Betty has long since realized her father is not aging, and that her mother is moving forward. 

Betty finds out three days after it happens, when her mother places a long distance call to Wellesley. 

He stuffs a rag into the tailpipe of the family Chevy—the very Chevy he maintained with careful precision, the very Chevy that Betty learned how to take apart and put back together—and closes the garage.

Alice reads her the note over the phone, and Betty is struck mostly by how pleasant her father sounds in it. It’s almost as mild as a note left on the fridge: _I have gone out for milk and eggs_. 

It’s amiable. But her father has always been— _was_ always perfectly amiable. 

.

Betty leaves Wellesley behind, and takes the long train ride west.

She spends two months with her mother at home, and then she enrolls at Cal for the spring semester.

She does not return to Massachusetts. 

.

When she finishes her degree, she comes home to Sacramento.

The _Union_ welcomes her with wide arms. In high school she’d spent her summers copy-editing there several days a week, always under her father’s eye. And now she is here again—five days a week, “Hal Cooper’s daughter.”

She lives in her mother’s house, and she commutes to the paper in her father’s car.

.

It’s ten months of this before she begins to think she might snap.

She’s granted a fortnight’s reprieve when she goes back east, to New York.

She wears a lilac gown and stands between Cricket O’Dell and Marcy McDermott in the bridal party of Mrs. Archibald Andrews.

Veronica is a beautiful bride, and Archie dotes on her. The girls gush over Veronica’s ring, over her lace train, and gossip about who is most eligible among the ushers.

It’s here she first meets Adam Chisholm.

Adam is a Dartmouth grad, a classmate of Archie’s, and he is paired with her in all the festivities. Betty realizes this is Veronica’s doing when Veronica winks at her during the rehearsal.

Adam is tall, and has sandy hair, and is very polite. Betty thinks he’s a Sacramento boy, just the kind of boy her mother looks upon with the faintest approval. He’s from Michigan, but never mind—Betty wonders if most men are Sacramento boys.

But Betty does not want to be a Sacramento girl any longer.

She spends a not insignificant amount of time leading up to the wedding in conversation with him—they have interests in common. He also works in newspapers, and is even soon to head west: he’s accepted a newsroom job at the San Francisco _Chronicle_. 

“Low totem pole,” he tells her in such a jocular and genial fashion that she thinks he must appreciate the machinations of hierarchy, that he likes the comfortable order to the ladder that lies before him—a ladder that he will undoubtedly climb. There is no question, in the mind of a person like Adam Chisholm, that there is a space for him on each rung, and that each forward step will inevitably lead him in the direction he seeks.

Betty thinks this over as she listens to him talk, and realizes that she wants that. She wants the security of mind and self that Adam seems to possess innately. She desires it.

She cannot yet separate this desire into its disparate parts. She cannot quite untangle a yearning to _be_ Adam from a desire to be _with_ Adam—and so when he asks her politely if he may kiss her, she tilts her head up to him, and obligingly closes her eyes, and lets him.

.

He drives down to Sacramento to spend a Saturday with her, and Alice raises her eyebrows at her when Adam turns to walk Betty to his car, a gesture Betty chooses to ignore, fidgeting instead with her gloves.

When Betty travels to San Francisco to interview for a role she covets, however menial it might be—nearly a glorified copy girl, but a copy girl in San Francisco—Adam takes her to dinner at the Blue Fox.

Adam always holds the door open for her, pulls her chair out for her to sit, rises from the table when she stands or enters the room. 

But Betty has had a good day—she knows the job will be hers, and that she will move to San Francisco, and perhaps—perhaps—get what she wants.

.

She tells Adam what she wants, and at first he seems reluctant—Betty can perceive his hesitation, and seeks to alleviate his fears. When she asks him if it is her, does he not want her, he’s seemingly mortified to have given her the thought.

“Bett— _no_ ,” he is emphatic. He glances at the table next to them, but their fellow diners are none the wiser. “It’s not that—I _absolutely_ wa—” he whispers, and Betty shakes her head.

She shrugs, folds her napkin beside her plate. “Will you take me home, please?”

.

Adam does not drive her to Googie Gilmore’s apartment, the Alice-approved friend from Cal with whom she has planned to spend the night.

They drive to Adam’s apartment in Telegraph Hill, and he holds the door open for her to enter.

It’s clean, if sparse—a bachelor’s home. Again, Betty feels a stab of desire.

“It’s not much,” Adam tells her, and when she turns to him, his arms are by his sides, and he stands at least six feet from her.

Betty smiles at him. She places her purse and her gloves upon his table, gently kicks her heels aside, and reaches up to pull his lips to hers.

.

She thinks he is surprised. She wonders—not even afterwards, but in the middle of things—if he is shocked by her, if he likes this boldness.

She struggles to suppress her smile as he gasps loudly and swears when she takes him into her mouth, and though this is a thing she has never done before, she feels invincible—as though if she were to err, he would likely not notice.

.

Adam treats her as though she is porcelain.

They continue to date when she moves to San Francisco, and Alice asks after him on their weekly phone calls.

They continue also to sleep together. Sometimes, Betty feels like she will never get enough. Adam calls her insatiable one evening, and Betty feels like the word does not fit.

Is she truly hungry? Betty knows hunger—she feels hunger whenever she sees one of her fellow writers latch onto a promising lead. She feels hunger when Adam takes her to bed. They’re alike, she thinks—these hungers. She reaches out to grasp something—but it forever exceeds her reach.

. 

When Betty and Adam have been steady for more than a year, he offers her a diamond ring.

He’s asked her mother, he tells her, and Betty feels frozen in place.

She thinks about the Andrews wedding. She thinks about Midge Klump’s wedding before that—Midge Mason now. 

Betty thinks of these nuptials and of these subsequent marriages, as she stares at this ring on the table before her—and thinks only _no_.

.

Adam seems stunned when she finally vocalizes this refusal.

There is an argument. Adam does not understand, and Betty herself is not entirely sure she understands it herself. 

“What do you want, Betty?” he asks her, and she can only shake her head.

.

To escape her mother’s disappointment, as much as to make her choice stick, Betty goes east again.

This time, she goes to New York.

She accepts a junior editorial role at _Vogue_. It’s not the job she wants, but it’s the job that will have her.

To placate Alice, she spends two months in residence at the Martha Washington Hotel on East 29th Street. But the rules—curfew, guests, _men_ —chafe, and soon she moves into a railroad apartment with two girls she meets there.

It’s not what she wants exactly—but it’s also not what she doesn’t want, and she considers that the lesser of two evils, a step in the right direction.

.

On a warm day in June, 1961, Betty boards a bus in Washington, DC.

She’s taken the train down to the capital, stayed in a hotel the evening before, on expense, for this very assignment.

CORE and SNCC have been testing the bounds of _Boynton v. Virginia_ , integrating these interstate bus lines, and Betty is here to witness this, their fourth attempt in the span of a month with instructions that she write about it.

An assignment, let alone a plum one that she finds personally interesting, is not always a guarantee. But Bret Weston Wallis had snapped his ankle in a pick-up game of weekend football, and Betty chooses not to look a gift horse in the mouth, nor dwell on the number of times Weston Wallis had snickered when she’s spoken up in meetings, vouched for herself, or even deigned to request an assignment—to do the job for which she was hired, essentially. 

She’s met many Brets in the time she’s spent in newsrooms. She prefers when they ignore her wholesale instead. It still smarts when they call her “the girl,” when they confuse her for the secretary.

She doesn’t have the pedigree of the men in this newsroom—neither their schooling, for those who came up in privileged east coast prep schools and graduated from Ivies, nor does she have the lengthy tenure that has grandfathered in so many of the old guard, the newshounds who have seemingly been here forever.

But she is here; she will witness, she will relay, and she will succeed.

She finds a seat on the bus next to a man who wears a green polo and a furrowed brow. 

He watches Betty out of the side of his eyes with what she at first reads as disdain, before realizing it instead might be fear. The man’s fists rest upon his thighs, knuckles white, and he stares straight ahead. 

“Betty Cooper, _Herald Tribune_ —how do you do?”

The crease between the man’s eyes appears to smooth, near imperceptibly, and he glances down at the hand Betty holds out to him.

“Chuck Clayton,” he tells her, and his handshake is firm. He does not return her smile. 

.

Betty spends the first leg of the trip gathering the lay of the land, both literally—gazing at the passing landscape through the windows of the bus—and figuratively. She interviews the group’s leader, quietly, taking notes rapidly as he speaks, and then she talks with two of the other riders.

They’re enthusiastic, with the near-zealousness of converts.

“We all signed our last wills and testaments last night before they left,” she hears. “We know someone will be killed. But we cannot let violence overcome nonviolence.”

.

The first time the bus stops, it’s at a station in Wilmington, for thirty minutes.

None of the Freedom Riders follow Betty into the station building.

When she reemerges into the hot summer sun, newly relieved, she is initially unable to find the group, though the bus remains idle beside the station.

She finally traces them to the rear of the station, where a man in an apron stands under a sign reading _Pop’s_ , flipping burgers upon a grill.

Betty walks up behind Chuck Clayton, who politely refrains from biting into his hamburger when he notices her, but he remains silent.

“Have you eaten here before?” she asks him, gesturing to the man—Pop, she wonders—at the grill.

“No, ma’am,” Chuck shakes his head. “Never been to North Carolina before.”

“Oh—just Betty, please,” and she thinks to add, “if that’s okay.” Chuck nods, and does not speak.

“Is that Pop?” she tries again, and Chuck nods, gesturing her forward.

“The classic is excellent,” he tells her, and when Betty smiles up at him, he returns it with one of his own. 

His eyes crinkle at the corners when he smiles, Betty notices, and she thinks it brightens his entire face. 

.

On the second day of the trip, Betty spends her morning talking with Chuck.

(She has another full day to get enough quotes, she tells herself.)

Chuck tells her about himself—where he is from (Brooklyn), his work drawing cartoons for the _Amsterdam News_ and the Associated Negro Press, about attending the nonviolence training arranged by the Congress of Racial Equality.

Betty tells him she is from Sacramento—she tells him about California, about the irrigation ditches that line all her childhood memories, about the smell of newsprint that has chased her across the continent.

.

The Riders have only just stepped off the bus, on the third and final day of the trip, freshly arrived in Ocala and just about one hundred miles out from St. Petersburg, before they are swarmed by deputies.

_At least it’s not a mob_ , Betty thinks. _At least they are not throwing stones_.

Betty attempts to speak with a deputy who, with a gentle hand on her bicep, attempts to steer her away from the arrests. He does not realize that she is a reporter. When she identifies herself, the grip upon her arm grows strong, almost painful, and she is bodily moved away from the epicenter of the scene, despite her vocal protests, despite her attempts to dig her heels into the hot and sticky asphalt.

The deputy, when he turns his back to her, spits a brown and tobacco-scented wad of saliva upon the ground, and retreats back toward where the Riders are being shoved into the paddy wagon.

Betty catches Chuck’s eye, but then his head ducks to enter the vehicle, and he is gone.

.

Betty checks into a hotel, files her piece by phone, and the next morning boards another bus that will take her back to New York.

.

Betty does not see Chuck Clayton again—until the following spring, at a party in an old warehouse in Harlem.

There’s a band in the corner, and a keg of warm beer in another, and a crowd of dancing bodies in between, sweaty despite the March chill that seeps in through the old warehouse windows.

She’s just stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray that sits upon a windowsill when she hears “Betty Cooper?” and out of the crowd, tall and familiar and smiling at her, is Chuck Clayton.

.

They go to Sylvia’s, and he tells her about the arrest, about the months he spent on the prison farm at Glades, about his eventual release and return to New York.

Betty asks him questions, and though he pauses before he responds, he answers every one.

“You’re not taking notes,” he observes, and Betty looks up from her plate.

“I’m not writing a story,” she says.

Chuck nods, digs his fork around in his okra.

“So why are you here?” he asks.

Betty bites the corner of her lip, looks down at her plate for a moment before glancing back up.

Chuck is not smiling, but she thinks she can still see the smile in the corners of his eyes.

“Well—” she says, “you’re here.”

.

Chuck does not invite Betty to his apartment until their third date—or second, maybe first. She’s not entirely certain when they are dating, but then they are.

He takes her to the coffee houses downtown for comedy, and music, and poetry readings, and combinations of all three.

She takes him out to Coney Island one Sunday, where they ride the Cyclone together. When she screams, Chuck grasps her fingers tightly, hidden between where their thighs press against one another on the seat. 

Chuck takes care to keep at least two feet of space between them as they walk the fairgrounds, and he does not hold her hand. 

.

She does not tell Alice about Chuck—at least, not in so many words. She does not care to know her mother’s opinions on who she dates, or how she wishes to share her heart. 

.

And Betty loves Chuck, she thinks.

She likes being with him as much as she hates hiding that fact in some of the places they visit.

She likes the way he brushes her hair back from her shoulders as he looks into her eyes, as his hands frame the back of her head when he leans in to kiss her.

Their relationship is betrayed, ultimately, by how easy it has been. 

It seems, to Betty, that of course it would be something entirely unexpected that would cause them to stumble.

.

In the fall of 1964, what Betty perceives to be a mild political aside leads to the most consequential argument she thinks she’s ever been a part of.

Betty realizes that she has kept Chuck at arms’ length. Or perhaps he keeps her there. She isn’t entirely certain. It is something they do not discuss, much as they never discuss meeting one another’s parents. It is as though they’ve come to an unspoken agreement to circumvent the topic entirely.

Chuck’s father, who—despite living across the East River in Brooklyn, with Mrs. Clayton—Betty has never met, is a long-retired USMC captain.

Of this, Chuck is proud. Betty knows this; she would not insult Chuck, nor his parents. She understands why she has not met them, that Chuck has not met Alice for the very same reasons, never mind that Alice is thousands of miles away in California.

She does not understand his upset at her words, when she points out that there are seemingly hundreds, thousands of people who think the United States military has no business being in Vietnam, that _she_ is inclined to agree. 

_Chuck_ is not a Marine, and Betty sees rage in his eyes when she points out that _he_ is not rushing to enlist, _he_ doesn’t seem all that eager to ship out to Vietnam any time soon. 

They are loud—she is loud. Betty ends the night hoarse, embarrassed to think her neighbors have overhead this argument.

She is ashamed to even have been so loud—Chuck has not spoken in a register any higher than his regular speaking voice, and seemed about to implore her to soften her voice every time it rose, lest her neighbors invoke the spectre of law enforcement.

She feels guilty for this. But she also has the ability to recognize her flaws, while simultaneously standing firm on a value.

And this is a strength, Betty thinks, when Chuck finally leaves near dawn.

She knows herself. No one will know Betty Cooper better than Betty Cooper does. 

.

The snapshot Veronica includes in her letter is a bright Kodachrome, clearly posed, but not uncomfortably.

The four of them sit upon a couch—on Archie’s lap is a little boy with his father’s bright red hair, and he peers into his mother’s arms, where his baby sister lies curled tightly into a blanket.

Betty studies the photo closely. Archie isn’t smiling—he’s too distracted by keeping a hold on his eager son—but his eyes are bright and happy. Veronica watches her children with a grin so wide it nearly causes her to squint. 

Betty leans closer to the photo, peers at Veronica’s eyes until she thinks she can detect the most minute of smile lines there—the sign of a happy life, surely.

But then—Betty’s mother had lines too, and Betty had never been brave enough to ask her mother how she felt about her life. She has never questioned her mother about her life before Hal Cooper, about how Hal did not seem to age as his wife did.

Betty thinks about her mother, and about her friend, as she stares at the snapshot, as her tea slowly grows cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are a number of real individuals that I’ve used as templates for Betty’s life, but rather than point them out to you, I’ll simply say that if it seems familiar you might be onto something. 
> 
> [The review](https://www.nytimes.com/1939/08/18/archives/the-screen-in-review-the-wizard-of-oz-produced-by-the-wizards-of.html) of _The Wizard of Oz_ quoted is by Frank S. Nugent, published August 18, 1939 in the New York Times.
> 
> The quote Betty hears from one of the Freedom Riders are words of [Diane Nash.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diane_Nash) I have played a touch loosely with history here, so I appreciate your tolerance. 
> 
> Next: our heroes meet at long last.


	3. Jughead and Betty

_Los Angeles, 1972_

  
  
  


When Jughead Jones meets Betty Cooper, he is twenty-eight and she is twenty-nine. 

.

Jughead has no particular interest in attending this party, in the winter of 1972, somewhere in Laurel Canyon.

But his screenplay is finished, and has been refined, and this director has courted him, and he wants to play nice because this picture has a true chance of being made, and he wants to do right by it.

That nevertheless does not put him at ease, in this room full of Hollywood people—including all of those he’s come to understand have no official role in this industry but circle within and around it. In some ways, he thinks, these are the true denizens of this town.

He’s just begun to develop this thought when Sabrina appears before him, breaking into his daydream. She’s at eye level, but it’s only because of the severe height of the platforms on her shoes.

“Get out of your head, Jones,” she tells him. “Come and be a social creature, it’ll be good for you.”

Sabrina pulls him by the elbow to where her husband stands. Harvey is speaking to a woman whose blonde hair hangs down her back in gentle waves, a pair of eyeglasses resting atop the crown of her head.

“Betty,” Sabrina says, pulling at Harvey’s bicep, “this is FP Jones, he’s an old friend of mine, he writes; do you mind making him talk while I steal Harvey?”

When this woman called Betty nods and shrugs, Sabrina beams her thanks. “Jug—Harvey knows Betty from the _Times_ , she’s smarter than anyone, I promise,” and in an instant, Sabrina has disappeared back into the crowd, Harvey trailing behind her.

.

“The New York _Times_?” The man Sabrina has pushed in front of her—FP Jones, she thinks she has heard the name before—asks her. 

“The Los Angeles _Times_ ,” she corrects, holding her hand out to him. “Elizabeth Cooper.”

FP Jones reaches for her hand and shakes it. His hand is warm. “Jughead Jones. It’s nice to meet you.”

“You write?” she asks. When he nods, she follows up by asking him, “What kind of things do you write?” 

“Novels,” his head bobs once to the left, as a kind of declarative motion. “And now a screenplay.”

Betty squints up at him. “Everyone has a screenplay in Los Angeles,” she says, and he shrugs.

“Who am I to break convention?’

.

Betty Cooper, when he asks about her work at the _Times_ , seems surprised at his follow-up questions. But he’s curious about newspapers and the people behind him, so he asks further questions, and when he notices Betty’s glass is empty, he leads her toward the bar for another one, and asks her yet more questions. 

.

“You went to Woodstock?” he asks as he holds the lighter up to her mouth, and she nods.

She breathes out smoke, picks a stray bit of tobacco from her lip. “I wrote about it. Thought it’d be an opportunity to see some music.”

He nods. “And?”

The smoke curls slowly down from her nose. “Not enough bathrooms,” she says, and he laughs. 

.

Betty nurses her last drink until she is nearly positive she’s sober again. She wants to regard Jughead Jones with clear eyes.

He talks about newspapers with a kind of knowledgeability that she doesn't expect from a screenwriter—but then, she thinks, so many of her fellow reporters in this town have tried their hand at skipping industries. She tells him she’s recently written about Title IX, about the recovery of the Apollo 17 crew after splashdown in the Pacific. When she mentions she is soon going to New York to interview the co-founders of _Ms_., his eyes flash in recognition. 

“I gave my sister a subscription to _Ms_. for her birthday.”

Betty asks him about his sister. 

“Oh, she’s a teacher. She lives in Oregon, with her—partner.”

Jughead Jones speaks about his sister with such an endearing affection, it makes her think of Polly, and for a moment her heart aches—but then the host of the party comes to claim Jughead, pulling him away to speak with someone, about something—Betty is too distracted to capture the details—and she feels an odd stab of annoyance pulse through her.

.

Jughead tries to keep track of Betty Cooper out of the corner of his eye.

Once he’s done his due diligence, talking with the director and the producer and the financier, he turns and realizes he’s lost her.

But then—he spots the royal blue of her sweater against the deep rich brown of the paneling, and she smiles when he catches her eye.

.

Jughead realizes nearly an hour later that he’s spent most of the evening speaking with this woman.

He doesn’t generally like parties; it’s rare, in his experience, to look up and realize the hours have raced past, that it is late and he long since could have reasonably snuck away into the night, having completed his usual cursory appearance. 

But Betty has distracted him, and so pleasantly, he thinks. When he watches her speak about her work, her enthusiasm feels like a drug that wafts off of her and into the air. He feels a rare hook of desire pierce his chest. He asks her before he even realizes he is going to do so.

“Would you like to leave with me?”

Betty tilts her head slightly to peer up at him. Her gaze seems thoughtful, and Jughead sees that her eyes are a light, bright green. 

“No,” she says.

_Well_ , he thinks. He has survived more awkward endeavors, he tells himself, he survived an actual _war_ —but then Betty continues. 

“But you can come to my place,” she says. “If you’d like?”

Jughead looks up and catches her eye. She smiles at him. 

“I like my place. I feel safe there.”

Jug is reminded of Cielo Drive, and nods in agreement. “Okay.”

.

Betty winds her Camaro through the hills, with the writer in her passenger seat. For the most part, they’re silent; Betty keeps her eyes on the road and FP Jones—Jughead—appears to watch the streets pass outside his window.

.

She unlocks her door (lifting the sticky key just so), kicks her shoes off in the hall, and begins to move through the house, flicking on every other light so that they’re not stumbling about in the dark.

She hears him trail behind her until the kitchen, where she finds herself alone. She sees she’s left the rear porch light on.

She calls through the house, asks if he’d like a drink (“Ah, sure”), chips some ice out of the refrigerator and into two glasses, pouring rye over them so that they crack and fizz.

“You can put something on,” she calls.

“Hmm?” 

His head pokes through the kitchen door, and Betty notes the curl that falls over his temple.

“You can put a record on,” she repeats, as she pours soda over the rye.

Betty sips from her glass and eyes her reflection in the dark of the windowpane, pulls a lock of hair behind her ear before changing her mind.

She carries the drinks toward the sound of Neil Young leaking gently from her record player ( _doesn’t mean that much to me to mean that much to you_ ), and finds Jughead with his neck at an odd angle, reading the spines of the books upon her table in the half-light.

He looks up when she enters, nods back to the bookshelf behind him.

“Anything you’d recommend?” he asks, accepting the drink she hands him.

“You’re the novelist, you tell me.”

He shrugs, but Betty can’t tell if this humility is feigned or innate. _His_ books aren’t on her shelf, but he does not point this out, instead asking her if she’d enjoyed _The Bluest Eye_ , and what she’d thought. 

.

Betty sees her opening when there’s a natural lull in the conversation.

She places her glass delicately upon the table with a subtle clink, and stands.

Jughead immediately stands after her, and she smiles at him. He doesn’t smile back, but his eyes watch her carefully as she crosses to the record player and flips _Harvest_ to the A-side, softens the volume ever so slightly, and walks back toward him.

She places her hands on his chest, to either side of his sternum, and leans up to kiss him.

.

She leads him by the hand to her bedroom, where she excuses herself to the bathroom. She’s brief, so when she reemerges he’s only just sat upon the edge of her bed.

He moves to stand again when he sees her, but she stays him with her hands on his shoulders.

He hooks his hand gently around the back of her neck, and she leans down to kiss him. It’s warm, and gentle, and his mouth opens to hers when she trails her hand down to the buttons of his shirt.

His hands track a path up the back of her thighs and under her skirt, and she feels a moan rise in her chest at the sensation of those hands over her ass, across her waist, reaching up to unzip her dress.

But she laughs in glee when he pulls her forward to land on her back, and he covers her body with his own, as he smiles at her laughter.

.

Betty has no qualms with going to bed with someone new. She likes sex, and she likes this sex.

She’s used to men underestimating her—the number of times she’s hit a scoop because a source thought her harmless—but Jughead lets her take the lead, like he’s aware she knows what she wants and is curious to know what that is.

She’s curious about him. He may let her lead, but he’s clear in expressing his desire for her. Betty appreciates this; it makes her feel powerful, comfortable in asking what _he_ wants. The question seems almost to make him stumble. 

But then his lips trail down her stomach and over her thighs, and she gasps in desire as he flips her onto her stomach.

.

She comes a second time like this, the feel of his mouth upon her shoulder blade, one of her fists buried in his hair, the other braced against the mattress. 

.

On a weekday in early January, Betty leaves the newsroom, takes the elevator down to the street, and steps out to buy herself lunch.

Instead, she soon finds herself browsing the aisles at Caravan Book Store. 

Under the Js, she finds five books—three different novels—by FP Jones.

She runs her finger down their spines, over the titles and the letters of his name, and tips one out of the shelf at random.

The cover of the paperback displays a colorful series of abstract shapes that when looked at from a distance, she realizes, resembles a cityscape looming behind a series of green hills. 

It’s called _Soft Drowsy Hours_. Betty carries it to the register, where she purchases it, and carries it back to the _Times_ building under her arm. 

.

Jughead runs into Betty Cooper again on a Friday afternoon in May, at a movie theater.

He’s a bum screenwriter, he has no excuses to make for himself—but Betty is a busy reporter. He’s looked: her byline has appeared in his copy of the _Times_ every day since he’d first sought it out after the turn of the year. It had taken him a few passes before he’d realized she was “E.A. Cooper.”

But Betty smiles brightly when she spots him and asks if the seat next to him is spoken for. The theater is nearly deserted.

“Please,” he tells her, his hand gesturing to the seat, but before he can ask her any questions, the lights dim.

.

“That was terrible,” she says when they emerge squinting into the light of the day, and he nods in agreement. They discuss the film’s last-minute twist, walking slowly to the edge of the street.

“I read your second book,” she tells him.

“Oh, no.”

Betty narrows her eyes at him, and he shrugs noncommittally. 

“I liked it very much,” she says, and Jughead scratches the side of his neck. Betty recognizes his discomfort, and wraps her hand around his elbow. 

“Are you hungry?” she asks him, and he feels his brows rise of their own volition.

“I’m always hungry,” he responds.

She regards him carefully. “Even after a film about cannibalism?”

.

He finds himself once again falling into Betty Cooper’s bed and thinks he must all of a sudden be a lucky bastard. 

Betty’s brow draws together just before she climaxes.

He watches for this V that appears between her eyebrows, and suddenly realizes it has popped up in his dreams.

He doesn’t remember this dream at all, until he finds himself here again, in this moment, with Betty’s furrowed brows relaxing into seemingly blissful contentment. 

He thinks it is beautiful. He thinks he’d like to see it again, as soon as possible, and when he hears himself say this out loud, Betty laughs, her fingers still digging into his shoulder blades near-painfully, her eyes still closed, like she does not want the moment to end. 

. 

“Why were you at the theater so early?” he asks.

“Why were you?” she tosses back to him.

He has only to raise an eyebrow, and she smiles. She shrugs.

“Sometimes I just have to get out of my head. I don’t make a habit of sneaking out of the office, so I can get away with it when I do it.”

Jughead stubs his cigarette out in the ashtray that sits on the table by her bed, and his eye is caught by the art that hangs upon the wall above it. 

It’s just a pencil sketch, and it’s firmly on the cartoonish side of uncanny, but it’s unmistakably Betty—a pencil behind her ear, bent over a typewriter, the smallest of graphite marks mapping out the small V between her brows. It’s Betty, focused.

“That’s very true,” Jughead tells her when she climbs back under the sheets to lie upon her stomach next to him, and she glances to where he gestures. She nods, but doesn’t say anything.

Her fingers comb through the tangles in her hair. Jughead thinks of his hands buried into her hair, trying to summon all of his wherewithal to not grip tighter or pull any harder, of her laughter, of her soft voice when she told him _it’s okay, it’s good_. 

“An old friend drew it for me,” she finally says, her eyes focused upon her work. Jughead gets the idea that she’s avoiding his eyes.

“C.C.,” he reads in the corner of the paper. 

She finally looks at him when she nods. “Chuck.”

“Chuck’s an artist?”

“He was,” she says. “He was drafted in sixty-eight.” 

Jughead nods slowly, says nothing further, and they’re silent for several minutes more before Betty brushes her hair back from her face and flips onto her back before she asks him, “Did your number ever come up?”

Jughead’s eyes scan the ceiling, back down the wall, and settle on the soft plane of her stomach, and he shakes his head.

“Combat exemption,” he tells her.

“You’re a veteran?” She sounds surprised, but when he raises his eyes to her face he reads only curiosity there, a kind sort of intrigue that Jughead’s begun to realize is Betty’s primary means of interacting with the world.

“Italy, forty-three, forty-four,” he says, “mostly.” 

Betty nods thoughtfully, gazes at the ceiling herself, before:

“How old are you?” Betty asks him. He shrugs. “You don’t know?”

“I stopped counting.”

She turns onto her side, rests her head in her palm and gently scratches at her scalp; he watches the movement, can see the darkness of her areola peeking out over the bed sheet despite the low light of the room.

“When were you born?”

He shifts to rest his head upon his bicep.

Nineteen-oh-five, he tells her.

“Ahh,” she teases, “so you’re…sixty-eight?” 

“I guess so? Sixty-seven. My birthday is”—he hesitates, but only briefly—“in October.”

“Well, you don’t look a day over thirty, if that. Probably younger.” She suddenly seems a little sad, and some unknown sensation hooks behind his ribcage. 

She slowly shifts her body closer, until she is resting atop him. She is warm where their torsos meet, where her thighs rest upon his own, but the tips of her fingers are cold, and she traps her hands between their bodies as though to warm them, as she rests the point of her chin upon his sternum.

“I was born in 1932,” she says, watching his eyes as she speaks. They’re so bright, her eyes, and Jughead’s not sure he’s ever seen this particular shade of green before, not even in nature.

He curls a lock of her hair around his finger, and opens his mouth to hers when her lips move to meet his.

.

To Betty, the summer of 1973 is a mere blink in the span of her life.

She opens her eyes: there is light. She closes them, and by the time she lets in the light again, it is over.

She spends most of the season away from Los Angeles, which she would normally not mind—summer in southern California burns. But to trade hot and dry California for humid and cloying Washington, D.C. feels particularly cruel.

But the hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Nixon’s reelection campaign, and on the break-in at the Watergate complex, have begun and this is Betty’s beat for the moment. She splits her time between the Russell Caucus Room and the _Times_ ’s D.C. bureau. 

Ostensibly, because she is not a local, this should not be her story. But something always seems to draw Betty east, she thinks. The thought distracts her, on a day in August that finds her once more in Los Angeles, when she’s finally returned home again, stories filed, a break in this routine imminent.

Something has pulled her west this time; maybe it’s as simple as the humidity, but the thought plants itself in the back of her mind and burrows there, latent. 

.

Jughead Jones calls her on a Saturday in August to ask her if she’d like to have dinner, and she agrees before she’s even checked her calendar. 

Betty can recall a day in late June, sitting in the overflow room at the Russell Building, listening to Senator Ervin drone on in his folksy manner, when her mind drifted back to Los Angeles. To a sunny Saturday afternoon in May and the feel of Jughead Jones’s dark mop of hair as it brushed her knees. She remembers trying to suppress the frisson that ran up her spine, a chill that belied the swampy D.C. air.

.

They meet at Casa Vega, on Ventura Boulevard.

Betty’s parked and leaning on the hood of her car, when a Triumph Bonneville rolls down the street, sliding to a stop between her Camaro and a green Ford Pinto. A man in a white t-shirt and denim steps off of it and she doesn’t realize it’s Jughead until he removes his helmet and smiles at her. 

Jughead, she thinks, has a lovely smile. It’s so open and sincere, she thinks it must be entirely unpracticed. She wonders if it’s thus a rare thing to witness. 

.

They eat mole and tacos in a red leather banquette, and Betty tells him about Washington. 

She watches him as he eats. He nods along with her words, and she wonders if he has called her before then, sometime when she was gone. It’s such a schoolgirl thought she feels her cheeks go red, and hopes he thinks it is just from the spice of the food. 

If he had called, he did not leave a message with her answering service.

.

They linger at the table. Betty asks Jughead about his own work, and he tells her he’s started another screenplay. He’s uncertain of what, if anything, is happening with the first one. He conveys a desire to distance himself from the confusing and inscrutable machinations of the studio that wants to make the picture.

When he trails off, he fidgets with his lighter where it sits upon the table, and then with the small candle that burns between them at the center of the table.

.

He follows her home on his bike.

Betty waits for him by her car, and they walk together to her door, where she pulls him inside with one finger hooked into his belt loop.

.

Jughead does not see Betty again until November.

He understands—he reads the stories she writes, follows the news from Washington, and when the Attorney General resigns, and then the Deputy Attorney General follows suit, and the president finally finds someone to fire the special prosecutor, he thinks to give her space.

Still—he’s surprised when she calls him a week later to invite him to dinner at her home.

.

It’s a dinner party, she was clear in her invitation, so he anticipates no special attention. Sabrina is there, and Harvey, as are several other reporters Betty knows from the _Times_ —a man named Kevin Keller and a woman Betty had once mentioned with some annoyance, named Donna Sweett. He meets Nancy Woods, who tells him she knows Betty from her time at the _Herald-Tribune_ in New York. There is also a man by the name of Dexter Howard, who introduces himself to Jughead by complimenting his books. 

He helps carry a platter of stuffed peppers from the kitchen to the table on her patio and looks back at Betty when she gently touches his shoulder to stop him.

When she softly asks if he’ll stay, he understands she does not mean simply the kitchen, and desire burrows into his spine as she smiles, and her green eyes go bright when he nods.

.

It is late, nearly one a.m. when the last stragglers have left, and Jughead hides himself in the kitchen, washing dishes, as Betty sees Kevin and Nancy out her front door with promises of returned invitations. 

Jughead senses her presence in the kitchen rather than sees her enter. It’s like a tickle at the back of his neck, not unpleasant.

She leans her hip against the counter next to him and dries the clean dishes with a rag, stacking them carefully as she finishes each one.

.

He thinks about the sensations of being with Betty, of lying next to her, the warmth of her skin on his, how their temperatures rise to meet one another. Of pulling her leg up over his hip, of how her nipples ruche under his thumbs; of the arc of her neck that he follows with his eyes as he moves within her.

He thinks about the potential absence of this, of all of this, and Betty’s kind eyes, and Betty’s laughter, and Betty’s hand within his own, and something inside him cracks. He buries his face into her neck, and chases the feeling from his body. 

.

“Her name was Joan,” he says. “She played the organ at the pictures.”

“Because the films were silent,” Betty teases.

“Because the films were silent.” Jughead smiles and nods. “What about you?”

Betty props her head on her palm, thoughtfully. “Dilton Doiley,” she says a little wistfully, “we went to high school together.”

“You were in high school?”

“No, no—this was later, in New Hampshire—ski weekend, first year at Wellesley. He was at Princeton. I figured he would be discreet.”

Jughead nods, and Betty watches him thoughtfully.

“That’s just what I tell people, though,” she says, “but really it wasn’t as...groundbreaking, let’s say, as it’d been with Veronica earlier.”

Jughead’s eyebrows rise. “Veronica?” Betty nods. “Veronica with the redhead and the three children on your fridge, Veronica?” She nods once more. 

“I don’t usually tell people that though.”

“No? Why not?”

She shrugs, as though the answer is obvious, and falls onto her back, stretching her arms high above her head. “Didn’t want anyone to think I was _fast_.” She punctuates the word with some irony, as though she is quoting someone else, and he wonders who that person is.

Jughead pulls himself up to lean against the headboard. “Betty Cooper, you _are_ fast,” he tells her affectionately, and watches as she laughs.

.

“Was he your—soulmate?” he asks.

Betty looks up at Jughead and realizes, when he bobs his head to the frame above her bedside table, the frame that houses Chuck’s caricature of her, he’s asking her this question—this very personal question.

But it feels different to be asked this question by Jughead. She can’t quite put her finger on how, or why. Instead, she shakes her head.

“No,” she says, “we broke up in sixty-five.” 

.

Jughead accepts a person-to-person call from Betty Cooper in late March.

He can tell from the timbre of her voice, once he tells the operator he will accept the charges, that she is upset.

“I’m sorry for calling you like this,” she tells him, insistent. “I’ll pay the charges, I just—I’m at a hotel and I can’t expense a personal call. I mean—they’ll ask me, they’re finicky about that, and—”

Jughead interrupts her, tells her it is fine, that he does not mind. He tells her it is nice to hear from her, and he thinks he can hear a smile in Betty’s voice when she tells him the same.

“What’s wrong?” he finally asks.

Betty is silent for a moment, and then she tells him her mother has died. 

.

Betty is in Washington again—G. Gordon Liddy has been convicted of burglary, of conspiracy—and that is where the telegram had reached her. 

Alice Cooper, she tells him, died of a stroke earlier in the day. 

.

Betty sniffles, and they are silent together.

“Are your parents...here?” she asks him.

“No,” he tells her. “My parents died a long time ago.”

He can sense Betty’s hesitation down the line. “What were they like?”

Jughead feels a ball lodge uncomfortably in his esophagus, so low it sits next to his heart. His eyes track along the keys of his typewriter. The enamel on the second row of keys is worn, the letters nearly indecipherable. “I didn’t really know my father. He died when I was thirteen. Twelve,” he corrects, “I was twelve. He was in France.”

“The war?”

Jughead makes a noise of agreement. “I have a photo of him. We look a lot alike.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I have my mother’s nose though.” When he hears Betty’s soft chuckle, the ball in his throat softens ever so slightly. “She died in the thirties. I don’t really know how. We...we hadn’t really said anything...for a while.”

The instinct to speak none of this, a practice he has maintained for decades, is mysteriously absent. In the face of Betty Cooper’s upset and discomfort, he finds himself digging deep into the recesses of his memory, in search of things to hand to her, so that she might hold them for her own purposes, or to show her, reassure her of the great likelihood that she will not be felled by this great sadness she is experiencing. 

He thinks himself a terrible example for her, that there are so many other people in this world that would better serve Betty Cooper, who are more deserving of Betty Cooper’s attentions, her affections, her trust—but then, she has chosen to call him. He does not want to fail when he has so clearly been called upon. He thinks he could not stomach this particular failure. It would not break Betty Cooper—it would break him. He _wants_ it to break him, in lieu of her. 

“Have you seen your sister? Recently, I mean?” Betty asks him, and so Jughead tells her about JB. 

He talks into the early hours of the morning. When he remembers that Betty is three hours ahead of him, and apologizes for keeping her awake, she softly tells him _no, no_. 

When they finally hang up, his throat is hoarse. 

.

By late spring, pre-production has begun on the film.

Part of Jughead thinks that his work is done, that he should have no involvement in the story going forward. 

But another part of him delights at the fact that it is actually nowhere near done, that soon a tale he has written, a screenplay he typed again and again, will find its home—eventually—on a white screen in a theater, somewhere in this country, wherever and whoever will deign to have it.

He’s there to witness the director and producer discuss the casting of the leading lady. He listens as they debate over two actresses who have already screen-tested for the role. They call these two women _the girls_ , and they speak of different parts of their physicality as though they are merely a collection of body parts. “It’s a disappointment she doesn’t have better tits,” the producer says of one of the women, and Jughead’s mind begins to drift away, back and out of this bungalow office at the studio, up and around Griffith Park, into—

The director pulls him from this drift. “Which one do you think, Jones?” he asks.

Jughead looks down at the headshots that litter the table, and points at the image of a blonde woman with short hair that curls at the ends, and dark kohl circles around her eyes. He thinks of the blind flower girl he’d seen on a movie screen sometime after he’d first left New York, of her face when she is finally able to see, of the moment she asks _You?_ and the little tramp nods at her. _You can see now? Yes, I can see now._

“Her,” he says. 

.

Jughead has not seen Betty since a weekend in late February, when he had driven her up and over the hills on his bike, and they had wandered farther and farther north until they were in the mountains proper. They’d spent the day wandering, returning to her home late in the evening. 

He knows—he thinks—she has since been mostly in New York, working. Betty is busy—that is life. He has no control over that. 

In April, Sabrina wrestles him into a blind date with a woman named Ginger, an actress. 

They go to the movies, and he holds a bag of popcorn for them both as they watch _The Conversation_. He finds himself forgetting the circumstances of this outing, is riveted in watching Gene Hackman’s face, silent and still. As they leave the theater, Ginger tells him she had found it boring. 

.

Betty is in New York when she hears Nixon is about to resign.

She’s at work on an entirely different story, but like everyone else, finds herself glued to the wire.

She gets back to the apartment she is renting for the duration of the trip late in the evening, but despite the fact she has been on the east coast for several weeks at this point, her body tries everything in its unconscious power to keep her on Los Angeles time. She wakes up groggy nearly every morning, and after a lifetime drinking mostly tea, she now finds she craves a cup of black coffee with one sugar, first thing in the morning. 

So in the young hours of August ninth, Betty looks into her bathroom mirror at perhaps less-than-standard operating capabilities.

She feels haggard, and so she thinks she looks haggard.

It’s when she leans closer, in somewhat of a self-loathing impulse—she is tired—that she notices it, by her left temple.

It’s a touch lighter.

Betty’s reminded of a day long, long ago as she leans toward her bathroom mirror, looking closely, as her hand moves to her temple and as she spots it, of her mother leaning into her own mirror with a discerning eye, a sad acceptance that feels so distant from how Betty feels now, in this moment.

.

Maybe it’s a fluke. 

Perhaps her hair is simply bleached from the sun. She’s grown tired of hats lately, has turned her face up toward the sun and simply absorbed its warmth. Her hair lightens as her skin darkens. It has always been the case. 

She thinks about it for three weeks before she realizes she’d decided long before she even arrived in the New York. 

.

Jughead’s film is put into production, late in the autumn of 1974. 

A screenwriter’s job is done long before production commences, and so he isn’t truly needed, but the director wants him on set, to consult and to rewrite as asked.

(The director, he thinks, is somewhat of a hack. The man’s wife designs the sets, but even Jughead can see that she carries the weight of this film upon her back, that hers is the only opinion that carries any sort of weight with the director, and if this film is to be anything, it is thanks to her.) 

And so he finds himself in Amarillo, Texas, with more downtime than he’d like. He attempts to fill the hours with more writing, but he is distracted. The heat itches at the back of his neck. 

It’s during such a moment of mindless idleness that the leading lady of the film finds him.

She’s young, he thinks, with bright blue eyes and shiny golden hair, and a canny flash in her eyes that tells him she’ll go far in her chosen path, that she knows how to get what she wants. He thinks he appreciates that kind of knowing. 

She smiles at him, asks if he can spare a cigarette. He holds the pack out toward her, and offers her a match as she stoops to sit beside him on the curb. Her spine is straight, and he thinks of the training he’s heard the studio puts its women through. 

They sit in silence for several moments, before she exhales smoke and leans toward him. “Have you been to Amarillo before?”

He glances at her, nods. “Yes,” he tells her, “a while ago.”

“Know anything fun to do here?” she asks. “Places to go?” Her face is hopeful, but not exactly what Jughead would call open. 

He ashes his cigarette and shakes his head. “It’s been years since I’ve been here. Everything’s a bit different now.”

She nods her head and watches as the production assistants carry tall lights toward the set, single-file. 

She shrugs. “Still,” she tells him, “we could find some place, or _something_ to do.” She glances around them, as though in search of this metaphorical something. “We make our own fun, don’t we?” 

The starlet, with her straight back and her shining hair, holds her cigarette delicately between her index and middle fingers. She rubs her thumb beneath her right eye in a motion that Jughead perceives as incongruous. It stops him for a moment. 

She _is_ young, he thinks. He’s young, in appearance, but he’s been here before—not just in Amarillo, but in this very conversation before. The realization makes him feel ill at ease, and he feels a shiver run up his spine. 

She seems to notice a change in him, because she cants her head in curiosity and brings her cigarette to her mouth thoughtfully. 

“Alright?” she asks him, and Jughead nods his head. 

“Just thinking of someone,” he tells her.

She nods, but just exhales her smoke, saying nothing.

Jughead sits in the silence for a moment before—

“I think I—” he begins. He stops, bites his tongue in search of what he is thinking. It’s just beyond his grasp, and he’s reminded of seeing the Pacific for the first time, back in 1938—this vast expanse of _something_. 

The blonde waits patiently, and Jughead feels the heat rise up the back of his neck. He’s a man who lives by his words, and he’s found himself at a loss.

He’s unsettled when she narrows her eyes thoughtfully and regards him. She stamps her cigarette out on the step next to her, places a gentle hand upon his shoulder to steady herself as she rises to her feet and brushes invisible dust from her trousers.

“I think I understand,” she tells him. 

Jughead wishes she would help _him_ to understand, because he’s not sure he fully grasps it.

But instead she simply smiles down at him.

“I’m sure you’ll figure it out soon,” she says, as though she’s read his thoughts. As she leaves to saunter back toward the set, he wonders if in fact she’s not as young as he’d assumed, if age and understanding are not so directly correlated as he’d like to believe. 

.

By 1975, Betty has argued her editor into a bit of a break.

Not so much time on the east coast, and she’ll be more flexible when it comes to reporting on state politics. There are rumors about the governor testing the waters of a presidential run. This makes Betty laugh—she’s always found him something of an empty cipher. Alice had always complained to her about _those Hollywood folks_ and how _Mrs. Reagan called the house on 16th Street a firetrap_ —but thinking too much on her mother makes her heart ache, still.

So when Betty contemplates spending the majority of her time in California, she thinks of other things that might tie her to this place, give her reason to stay here. She has always tacked east, only to find herself blown west again, time after time. This moment feels like a reversal of her life’s trend.

She considers the things she likes about her home as she looks around her space—the large window that looks out onto the laurel trees that insulate her from her neighbors—and her eye lands on _Harvest_ , propped up behind her stereo. It brings to the forefront of her mind blue eyes, and thick dark hair, a long nose and an old, tattered hat.

She keeps running into Jughead Jones, and has been since she met him, several years ago now. Something in her can recognize the intentional nature behind this.

She likes Jughead. He is smart, and thoughtful. He is quiet, but can speak at length, and so interestingly, when you asked him to, if he found you interesting, if you expressed interest in what he had to say. He reads newspapers, and books. She likes his body, and what it does to her body. She likes fucking Jughead Jones. She likes kissing Jughead Jones. She likes being held by Jughead Jones.

Betty thinks on all of this and spends hours wondering what it means. She has wondered these things before. She has loved with her heart before this time, she knows how to, can recognize this thing as love—even though love is different, every single time, because no man ever steps in the same river twice.

Betty loves Jughead Jones, because she chooses to love him.

All that is left to her is the choice to tell him this, and to tell him what she wants to do with that love.

.

When she calls him up, several days after she’s decided, he comes.

He is in his boots, and his jeans, and his t-shirt, and his funny hat hangs at his side in his hand, and her heart is warm when he looks up and smiles as she opens the door.

.

She loses all her words in an instant, and squeezes him tightly in her arms.

“Hey, hey,” he says when she sniffles, and he pulls back to look at her. She smiles and wipes a tear threatening to fall from her lashes.

“I’m okay, I just—I just missed you,” she tells him, and leans her cheek into his palm when he brings it to her face.

.

She has thought the words, but now that he is here, she cannot push them out of her throat. So she shows him with her body, as strongly as she can.

“Betty,” he pleads into her neck, “Betty, you know I love you, right?”

Betty runs her hands up and down his back when she tells him, “I know, I know, I know.” 

.

“Married?” 

Jughead’s surprised when Betty shows up at his house (it’s a Tuesday, early afternoon), but he can recognize he’s not disappointed. She eschews small talk and skips directly to her purpose.

He’s dumbstruck at her declaration, that she’s simply told him she wants to marry him. He tries to wrap his head around the idea, to connect the dots that have led her here. “But what about—?” His words trail away from him, but he’s not sure he began speaking with an idea of what he was trying to say. 

Betty shrugs, and is silent. After a moment when it becomes clear Jughead cannot summon the words, she speaks. “It’s my choice. And yours,” she hastens to add. “We decide for ourselves.”

Betty’s bold in a way that Jughead admires. Of the people Jughead has loved in his life, Jellybean has been foremost, always. He’s never let himself... _fall_ in love. He thinks. Surely he’d know? Did he love Sabrina? Certainly he’d loved Sabrina—but he’d survived when she left, hadn’t found himself desolate nor in despair. 

Maybe it’s not a question of desolation, he thinks. Maybe it’s a little more purposeful than that.

“Do you want to be with me?” she asks, and he’s torn from his thoughts. She lifts a staying hand to prevent him from answering as she continues. “I want you. And I want to be with you. What do you want?” she corrects. 

He feels his mouth open and close and feels like a fish flopping on a deck. 

“You don’t have to decide now, but I didn’t want to wait to tell you,” she says quickly. “I can leave you alone now,” but he stops her by grabbing her hand. Her small hand, with the cold, slim fingers, and the clear, round nails, that feels soft in his own.

He runs his thumb across her palm, feels for the crescent scars that hide there, that he has never asked her about, and then holds her palm to his mouth. 

He nods.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay,” she smiles.

.

Within the week they drive to Las Vegas.

Because why not—they’re not getting married in a church, their families are not here to argue, they just want it done and the only place to _just get it done_ is Nevada. 

“Reno or Vegas?” he asks, and she thinks for a moment before she decides, _Las Vegas_. 

.

Her dress skims her thighs, and though it looks white, Jughead’s been up close and knows it’s the palest, palest shade of yellow. She wears flowers in her hair, and he can smell them when she straightens his tie at the chapel and smiles up at him.

.

A wedding is a speedy affair when it’s essentially a shotgun effort.

Jughead asks Betty where she’d like to have dinner, and she tells him she’d rather return to their hotel. Jughead’s not sure he’s even been so blatantly _regarded_ with desire in the way Betty seems to now. He’s in a suit, he’s presentable (this is his _wedding day_ ), but he’s said a few formulaic words in front of this woman—his wife—and he feels naked before her. 

Jughead thinks about the people in his life who he’s given leave to know him. The list is short, so short he doesn’t care to think beyond his sister—and now Betty.

But then—this is different. He’s never been with someone the way he is with Betty.

When he thinks of his life’s relationships from this vantage point so many years after his birth, he can see—as if in relief, as though under a strong raking light—where he has felt love.

Before Betty, the person he’d loved most deeply has been JB. But this is different—for more than just obvious reasons, he thinks.

Jughead has never kept count, but knows he has witnessed, watched, read, surely thousands of love stories in his life. He has always thought they had a discernible pattern. He has considered this at length. He has mapped it out in daydreams, novels, stories, in screenplays.

It’s now that he understands what it is not only to choose, but to be chosen. Betty is independent. He has seen this in her because he recognizes it in himself. Betty may leave, but she comes back to him, and it’s when he realizes this is how she shows her love for him, that it finally clicks in his brain.

Or—it does not. There is no click, he thinks. There is just this—she and him, deciding— _this will be our love_.

.

So when Jughead asks Betty about dinner and she rolls her eyes at him, he feels wanted. 

When she pulls him back into their hotel room, when she kicks her heels clear across the room and pushes him to sit upon the bed with a smile, as she reaches beneath the short hem of her dress to pull down and step out of her underwear, he thinks very clearly _I love this woman_ , and the thought manifests as a ball of warmth behind his ribs.

He slows her down enough to unzip her dress, to undress himself, takes care not to crush the flowers in her hair, kisses her hard enough that he pushes her across the room and into the desk, where she scrambles upwards and pulls him into her.

.

He can feel her knees up nearly to his armpits, can feel her torso arch away from him, sees the curve of her neck, can smell the heady white flowers. He is here; he is transported. He’s never felt such an out-of-body experience before, especially one that has so very much simultaneously tied him to the earth. 

Briefly, he wonders if this is what people are talking about when they rhapsodize about dropping acid, but then Betty rears back up before him and conscious thought escapes his brain, save for the thought that this is his. 

.

Jughead drives her Camaro for most of the trip back to Los Angeles. Betty sits in the passenger seat, her crossed ankles resting on the dashboard, and watches her husband. He whistles, and she tries to recognize the tune. When she thinks she has it, she is surprised.

“Is that _Hair_?”

Jughead looks at her briefly before his eyes return to the road. “Hm?” 

“Are you whistling Age of Aquarius?”

He huffs a laugh. “No—‘Paint it Black.’”

She nods knowingly, almost humorously. “Dark.”

He shrugs. “It’s been stuck in my head.”

“How long?”

He thinks for a moment. “Since 1966.”

.

Jughead gives up the bungalow he says he doesn’t like in Westwood and moves into Betty’s little home in the canyon.

They move the long dining table to sit below the big window in the living room, and set their typewriters upon it—his blue Underwood, her green Olivetti Lettera. 

They spend many hours there, together and writing. Hours spent in silence while they write. They edit one another’s work. They discuss what they are writing out loud. Jughead tells her about his childhood daydreams, the raw thread of stories he kept to himself for years before writing them down. Now those daydreams become something he shares with her.

In turn, she tells him about her reporting. When she is trying to step back, gain scope of the larger picture, he listens, lends an outsider's ear. When she tells him she cannot keep all the players in her cast of characters straight, he lends her the index cards he uses to lay out the plot of his screenplay, and helps her arrange them on the wall with scotch tape, a web of influence (“And intrigue,” he adds, making her smile).

Betty’s voice finds its way into his head, like a second conscience, and it brings him an unexpected comfort—unexpected, because Betty’s is the voice that asks him _why_ , in a way that never leaves him in doubt of his person, but always pushes him to twice consider where he chooses to stand.

She is ballast. She is his sounding line. 

.

Jughead’s not sure why it happens when it does, but he’s more surprised that he’s the one to pose the question.

On a Sunday in December, 1975, when the winds fan across the valley, and Betty and Jughead have made themselves at home upon their sofa, Jughead leafing distractedly through a book and Betty writing with slow strokes of a pen onto a tablet of paper, the question comes to the forefront of his mind and finds its way out of his mouth almost instantaneously.

“Do you want to have a baby?” he asks, and his wife looks up from her work.

She appears to consider his question thoughtfully, and asks him, “With you?”

For a moment Jughead is surprised, but then Betty smiles and he feels foolish. She smacks his thigh gently, and shifts herself to face him a little more directly. She digs her toes under his thigh, and he rests a hand upon her ankle. 

She breathes deeply, in the thoughtful way Jughead recognizes her as doing when she needs a moment to collect her thoughts into words.

“I haven’t decided yet,” she tells him, and he nods. 

They’re silent for a comfortable moment, and he follows the thread of his thoughts. 

“It’s so different now, isn’t it?” he muses. “I mean,” he continues, when Betty leans her head against the cushions of the sofa to look at him, her eyes telling him to elaborate, “my mother never really got to... _decide_ that. At least, not reliably, I imagine.”

Betty nods in understanding. “I don’t think my mother did either.” 

“Couldn’t really ask her about it,” he says, and Betty nods, her eyes wide in agreement. He’s heard Betty’s stories of growing up with Alice Cooper. “I don’t…” Jughead begins, before trailing off. He tries again. “I have some concerns.” Betty raises her eyebrows, and he breathes deeply himself. “I worry about...losing them.”

As he tells Betty this, she appears to watch him closely, and he rushes to continue his thought before she might misinterpret him.

“I’m already—I’m already worried about losing you,” he tells her, and it’s here where their understanding appears to diverge, judging by the way Betty’s eyebrows pull together in confusion. 

“Really?” she asks him, and _of course_ is his answer. 

Betty rubs her lips together and watches him. Her eyes are soft, and if Jughead didn’t know any better, if he didn’t know and love and trust his wife, he’d think she was pitying him. 

She tilts her head gently to the side. “It’s probably really hard to bring a whole person—who is part-you and part-another person—into the world. You have no real control over it, don’t you? The only thing you can do is _choose_ to do it, and then it’s just...hope? I mean—you take care of them, and teach.” She shrugs. “But at some point they’re their own person, and you have to let them be them.” 

He watches her as she speaks, as she pulls a hand through her hair and fidgets with a strand.

“But it’s sort of like falling in love, isn’t it?” she asks, and her gaze turns to meet his. “You choose to love a person, and to be with them. I chose to love you, and to be with you.”

Jughead nods.

“And you chose to love me, and to be with me,” she points out softly. 

“But…” he starts. “That’s no guarantee, is it? There’s always a risk?”

Betty shrugs. “Sure—there’s always a risk. There’s a risk with anything.”

Jughead rubs his hand across his forehead, and he watches Betty as Betty watches him. He’s not sure he feels any more sure of himself, despite the confidence of his wife. His wife is the thing he is sure of, he knows. 

At this point, Betty reaches toward him, brushes her fingers across his temple, through the hair above his ear, and comes to rest against his cheek.

“May I show you something?”

She stands, and pulls at his hand. He rises and follows, her bare feet silent over the hardwood, to the hall, where a mirror hangs beside the door.

Betty pushes him to face the mirror, stands behind him and puts her chin on his shoulder. She reaches a finger up and around to press softly between his brows, gently smoothing the spot where they pull together, running the pad of her index finger down the gentle thread of the wrinkle that remains behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I had been able to work in Paul Simon’s [American Tune](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OEWBq_jzuA) and Neil Young’s [A Man Needs a Maid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp12oDiT-oA), I truly think I would have succeeded that much more with this story. As it is, it could certainly not have been written without them as a foundational soundtrack.
> 
> Thanks again to arsenicpanda and loveleee, as well as to village-skeptic for her keen eye. And stillscape, because she is stillscape (and because she shared some expertise for this chapter specifically, in addition to one _very_ haunting photograph). 
> 
> Appresh also to the wikipedia list of Archie Comics characters—a real one, much exercised in the writing of this story. 
> 
> And thank you for reading.


End file.
